How to Find Scholarships on Summer Break
Why waste your Summer Break relaxing at the pool when you could use it to get money for college? Alright, that may not sound like a good tradeoff, but the fact is that the summer is a fantastic time to search for scholarships and grants. Make the most of your time out of school, and you will end up with less to worry about when classes start.
Here are the top 7 summer scholarship search tips.
1 – Set Goals for Your Applications
How many apps do you want to get through in a day, a week, a month, or over the course of the whole summer? Set goals for yourself so you have something to work toward. If you apply for 2-3 scholarships a day over the entire summer, you’ll have close to 300 scholarship applications out! The more you apply, the more you can earn.
2 – Fill Out Time-Consuming Applications
Most of us are guilty of putting off time-consuming apps in favor of the quick and easy ones – especially during the school year. With no distractions in place over the summer, you can focus all of your energy on these length-yet-rewarding applications.
3 – Write Sample Essays
Make the application process easier on yourself during the school year by pre-writing your scholarship essays now. You may have to modify the essays to fit different applications, but at least the base content will be there already. Check out our scholarship essay writing guide to learn how to improve your essays moving forward.
4 – Explore New Opportunities
Get creative with your scholarship searches. Don’t just search by state or by school. Look in categories you may have never thought of before. For instance, a lot of art scholarships may seem intimidating if you are not an art major, but the task at hand could be right up your alley. You won’t know until you give it a try.
5 – Put Together a Resume
Just because you’re not applying for a job doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have a resume. You can use this on your scholarship applications to show the providers what your true talents are. List your academic and professional accomplishments towards the top of the resume so you can blow them away with your skills, goals, and plans for the future.
6 – Participate in Summer Contests
The summer time offers a lot more opportunities for participation contests than the school year does. You could enter anything from a duck call contest to a beauty pageant, depending on what your talents are. Do a little more than just filling out apps online, and you may be surprised by the response you get.
7 – Search for Scholarships in Your Home Town
If you are traveling back home for the summer, search for scholarships in your local area. These may be different than the ones you normally have access to in school – and you may not have as many other applicants to compete against.
The key in all of this is to keep an open mind and pursue the numerous scholarship opportunities out there for you. If you can do that, you can get a lot from your summer scholarship search.
