Get Your Daily “Word”

Your world of scholarships might seem a tangle of long-standing college endowments, perpetual merit and need-based awards and perennial corporate-sponsored “big” prizes like Coca Cola Scholars and Microsoft Scholarships. But even these scholarships had a beginning once upon a time, most likely heralded by press releases and blurbs in local or national news lines. You’ve come to take them for granted. They are just there.

With scholarships quickly taking on the visage of a business necessity these days, it’s important to recognize the nature of such a business.

Origin of a Species

Whether you know it or not, each new day, or week, often is greeted by scholarship news from somewhere: “college/university adds more money to its coffers,” “company Z launches new scholarship,” “celeb sponsors scholarship.”

Your scholarship search is a dynamic process. The playing field is changing daily.

So given the fact that scholarships should be big news, but likely only hang out in the bigger maw of media, how do you best go about keeping current and ahead of the scholarship pack?

The Early Bird…

I propose that one way to get a leg-up in college scholarships is to simply be good at surfing the net, including the ability to quickly scan and dispose of information at the speed of light and an eye for what’s important to your needs. Almost all the current news you could possibly take in is flung out into cyber space on a 24/7 continuum; it’s non-stop.

If you had been “up” on the current Education news bites over the last week, and poked and prodded the maw of material to cull only those newsworthy for scholarships, you would have accumulated a fresh scholarship list that looks like this:

• Missouri students could see the state double needs-based scholarships.
• Oklahoma’s OHLAP program to get much-needed funds for longevity.
• 50-KFC Colonel Scholarships; up to $5,000 per to be awarded this year; awards renewable.
• Penn State College of Agri Sci to get $100,000 endowment for undergrad scholarships.
• Southwest Louisiana Electric Membership Corporation (SLEMCO) in LA will give 20-$2,000 scholarships to employees and dependents.
• Residents of oil town El Dorado, AR hit the jackpot with $50 million in scholarship dough from local oil company.
• Celeb Alicia Keyes new scholarships–$5,000 to students in NYC, Jacksonville, FL; Atlanta, and New Orleans.

Well, this is actually only a partial list. Which underscores my point. These snippets represent millions of dollars in scholarship news, happening as we speak.

Accessing Information

Get the latest Education news en masse via RSS feed or on Google News, my preferred method. Information too overwhelming? Chop out the unnecessary vegetation with a more granular filter/search term like “college scholarships.”

You find the programs that may work for you with daily diligence; overlook something and you could miss out. Remember: the early bird gets the worm.

Leave a comment