Finding verified student scholarships is time-consuming, even with Google and the internet at your fingertips. So, what else can counselors do to reduce the time spent on finding the right scholarship opportunities for their students so they can focus on other essential tasks needed to help their students succeed?
Take the three simple steps listed below to free up bandwidth on your plate instantly!
- Know Where to Look
- Stay Involved
- Embrace Automation
Know Where to Look
Knowing where to look for student scholarships is the first step towards success. The U.S. Department of Labor has a great scholarship research tool. It contains scholarship information for high school, vocational and college-level students. You can search by award type, type of affiliation required, gender, place of study, or where you live.
While the tool has an extensive listing of scholarships, it requires manually reading each scholarship description to find those that fit the student profile you are trying to match.
If you don’t find what you are looking for on the U.S. Department of Labor’s website, you can look for scholarships offered by your local state agencies using this link from the U.S. Department of Education’s website. Once again, you’ll have to review each scholarship description manually, but it at least gives you a place to start.
Stay Involved
Don’t skip the opportunity for a meet & greet with fellow counselors or professional mixers. These are great opportunities to swap leads on lesser-known student scholarship prospects and resources.
Look for scholarships offered by local businesses or civic organizations, especially those that collaborate with or have connections to your school.
Lastly, read each school district newsletter and check the blog section of their website frequently. School districts often post information about local scholarships in newsletters and blog posts, but surprisingly many go unnoticed.
Embrace Automation
The best counselor’s hack for finding verified student scholarships is to embrace automation. Every minute you save is time that you can redirect to assist students with preparing college application essays or writing letters of recommendation to support their success.
So, how can counselors automate the scholarship process?
Simple. Two words. Scholar’s App.
Scholar’s App gives counselors time-saving tools by streamlining the scholarship applications process. Discover verified local, state, and national scholarships instantly. The Scholar’s App will only suggest scholarships that precisely match the profile information of your students, so you no longer have to read each scholarship description manually.
In addition to making the scholarship application process smoother, the Scholar’s App also tracks the outcome of each scholarship submitted, making results available to you in live time.
In addition, instead of tracking student data manually and in multiple places, the Scholar’s App allows counselors to easily track student applications and any award status in a single location. Since it is a web-based solution, counselors can access their students’ information whenever and wherever needed.
So, if you’re ready to trade manual scholarship research for automation, then click here to create your Scholar’s App counselor profile.
