Outside Scholarships
Why compete for scholarships?Scholarship contests are one of the best things to do outside of school. Besides the obvious fact that they win you money for college or your own savings, they also carry a host of other benefits. First, winning scholarship contests is a great credential to put on your college application. It proves that you have talent and verifies to the college that objective third parties sources think that you are worth their money. Second, most scholarship contests require writing an essay or preparing a speech for recording or video. As such, while competing for money and prestige, you are also refining your own writing skills. Third, there are a broad range of scholarship competitions, meaning you can pick and choose which interest you the most. Many scholarship competitions allow fairly open-ended responses such as “what do you believe society’s most pressing problem is” or “what are your goals/passions”, meaning that you can write about things that you will have fun writing about. Fourth and finally, many of the same essay prompts for scholarship competitions show up on your college application essays, so you will be working on and improving ideas and essays that you will have to write later anyways!
Why use PathAspire for scholarship information?
Scholarship research can be a huge hassle. Most websites like FastWeb or Collegeboard require you to fill out multiple pages of forms and questions just to begin your scholarship search. The truth is, your responses to those forms rarely matter. Most scholarships will show up in your search results no matter what you put in. These search results are then under-inclusive, over-inclusive, or not helpful. Because big scholarship search engines use automated search processes and the knowledge of adults years removed from the education system, they often let many key scholarships and opportunities slip through the cracks. For the same reasons, these search engines churn out hundreds of useless competitions that almost everyone is ineligible for or have few potential benefits or rewards. Additionally, there is little to no actual analysis or rating on whether these scholarships are actually worth doing.
PathAspire changes the very dynamics of the scholarship search. Instead of pumping out hundreds of random contests, we list only scholarship contests that have been reviewed and considered by our staff of top high school students who actually have a personal stake in finding the best scholarships and not missing out on any opportunities. We will list not only the basic information such as deadlines, eligibility rules, and contact information, but also estimate the workload and give ratings for efficiency, monetary awards, prestige, and more. Like with everything else, PathAspire will insure you optimize the work you put into scholarships so that every minute maximizes your competitive edge and moves you closer to your goals.
This article was written by Xinquan (Paul) Gu
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