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Scholarships for Dummies: Common Sense Places to Look for Scholarships

Score a scolarship for being athletic, artistic, or wacky.

The economy is tanking. College tuition costs are rising. And somehow, you have to pay for college. Your only hope in paying for a higher education is with scholarships.

Being recognized as a valedictorian is totally out of the question. After taking the SAT three times, your results revealed limited improvement…and weren’t even that great to begin with. There is no need, however, to limit yourself to university-specific scholarships. Outside scholarships may seem like a far fetch…but they’re not as far as you think.

Service clubs, companies, and charities give out about $2 billion in private scholarships each year. Roughly 1 million students receive these monies—meaning 1 out of 13 students wins a scholarship. The average of these scholarships is $2,000. So are you ready to start looking?

Athletic Scholarships. Granted, this is only going to apply to a select few, but athletic scholarships don’t require a whole lot of brains. Rather, the importance lies in physical talent and drive.

Artistic Scholarships. There are plenty of art-specific scholarships available for students who do the research. Additionally, artists can use their skills to apply for non-artistic scholarships. Oftentimes, judges are looking for creatively convincing applications for “average joe” scholarships—think film, dance, song lyrics, paintings, etc.

Minority Scholarships. These scholarships are typically reserved for students from financially unprivileged backgrounds and ethnicities. Though these scholarships are not necessarily based on grades, they do require community service or athleticism—anything that sets you apart from the crowd.

Employee Scholarships. If you think your summer job is just a way to finance your love for video games or fashion, you’re wrong. Many employers, whether yours or your parents, offer scholarships to students just because of the relationship that exists between the two.

Wacky Scholarships. There are scholarships out there that are wacky enough for any high school student. Think Duck Calling and Duct Tape Prom Dresses. It just requires a little legwork in finding these scholarships. And by legwork, we mean typing “wacky scholarships” into a search engine. Was that too hard?

There is no reason that any student should pay full tuition for college. It just takes time and work to find ways to pay up. Remember, updating your FastWeb profile increases your chances of being matched with some of the types of scholarships mentioned above. So get on it!