Love Scholarships!

You Should Love Scholarships

College costs money.

If you want to go to college, that might be a problem for you. You have a few options for paying for it:

1. Rob a bank. I don't generally recommend this. Regardless of some slight accompanying ethical issues, if you were caught, you would be living in a jail. Not a dorm room.
2. Win the lottery. This is a really great option, but, sadly, the odds are not exactly in your favor. You might have better chances at robbing that bank and escaping the maximum security prison they'll put you in.
3. Find buried treasure. This could be super fun, albeit time consuming. Check out this book on treasure hunting that I know absolutely nothing about other than it promises to jump start your treasure hunting skills.

Some of you may want something a little more reliable than the aforementioned options, so I have a few more choices for you:

1. Go to a really inexpensive school. There are many fabulous inexpensive schools out there, and I encourage you to seriously look at them. However, they don't always offer the major you want, are in the area you want, or offer any number of other opportunities you know are crucial to your education and your personal development.
2. Go where you're offered a full ride or good scholarship. As I say in My Story, however, sometimes those full rides don't come from the school you truly feel called to attend. If you're relying just on scholarships through the college itself, you may feel pressured to attend a school that will not truly complete you.
3. Work your way through college. I have known dozens of students who did just this, and do you know what I saw? Burned-out, bleary-eyed zombies who worked harder than I thought humanly possible and hated every minute of it. They worked three jobs, took a full load, got no sleep, and had no time to live, rest, enjoy school, pursue their passions. School controlled them, they didn't control it. I don't want that to happen to you.
4. Don't work through college and accumulate loans. You could just forget about it and rack up the loans instead of killing yourself to get scholarships or hold down a job. The thing is, go back and read the first line of this page. What was it? College costs money. Well, the interest you're going to pay on your student loans for the next hundred and fifty years is going to turn that statement into College costs so much money selling your soul isn't going to get you out of debt. And that's more true than you may realize: if you're strangled by debt for the next thirty years, you're not going to be free to pursue your passions, live your dreams, and be the person God created you to be. Don't do that to yourself. Nothing is worth that.

This is the process I went through when trying to decide how to pay for scholarships. And even if you have a lot of money, or your parents are willing to pay for your school -- wouldn't you rather have no one pay anything? Wouldn't you rather take advantage of money already out there earmarked to pay for your education?

Of course. That money is out there, and you can get it, and it's called scholarships. You pay for college through scholarships, and you have no long working hours, no interest, no extra job. You have the school you want and the education you want and you can live life like you always wanted to live it.

And that's worth something.

Don't Hate Scholarships

People freak out when I tell them they should apply for scholarships. Before I've even finished my sentence they've buried me under at least fourteen reasons why they couldn't possibly ever in their lifetime even dream of hoping to apply for a scholarship and that basically it's a lost cause forever and besides they hate scholarships.

So why do you hate scholarships?

Objection 1: "Applying for scholarships takes too much time! Hours and hours of my life gone forever!"

I know you're practically in college, but let's go back to third grade math for a second here. You don't have time for scholarships. Okay, I get that. You're busy. You're working 20 hours a week.

Wait a second. You're working 20 hours a week, for, what, $8 an hour? Think about this.

Let's say you're a really great applier-for-scholarships (because you've read my e-book and know all of the secrets no one else does) and for every five hours you spend on scholarships, you win a $1000 scholarship. $1000/5= $200/hour. Nice. Even the President doesn't make that much.

Or, you could gripe that scholarships take too much time because you work some super important job. So to make the same amount of money, that's $1000/$8= 125 hours.

5 hours. 125 hours. And who is complaining about not having enough time, again?

Objection 2: "My geriatric three-legged cat has better grades than I do. I'll never get a scholarship."

While many scholarships do consider grades, there are huge numbers of scholarships that don't even take a sideways glance at grades -- they're all about character, involvement in the community, life goals, and more. There are even scholarships specifically for students with low grade point averages. Scholarships aren't for perfect people. They're for real people.

Objection 3: "I promise, I totally looked for scholarships, like, at least once. There were none that applied to me."

That's because you weren't looking in the right place. Don't worry, you were probably looking in the spots "everyone" told you to, but "everyone" doesn't know everything. You need to look in the right spots, and that's remarkably easy to do, and I explain it in detail in my e-book. (I mean, come on, did you know there are scholarships for tall people? There are scholarships out there for you!)

Objection 4: "I've applied for all kinds of scholarships, and I've never won even one. Scholarships are dumb."

Yeah, scholarships are pretty dumb if you apply for them in an equally thoughtless manner, which is basically like running down the sidewalk hollering that you need money. Not helpful. That's why you develop a strategy, know where to look for them, figure out how to apply, customize your application such that it blows the socks of the scholarship providers, and become an lean, mean, scholarship-winning, rolling-in-money machine. 

So stop hating on scholarships.