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My College Paid Me to Go, Yours Could TooJun 09 '00 Write an essay on this topic.Don't worry. I'm not the high tone scholar who breezed in to college after a brilliant high school career, nor am I the super jock. Those people may find grant and scholarship packages that pay for tuition, books, expenses, and living. But there's also the people like me. High School Confidential In high school I was anything but a high achiever. In fact, I was on what I called the "Whores and Outlaws" track. It was the track the school put the kids from extremely poor backgrounds, among others. We had a great time, but none of us did very well in grades. So how did I manage to graduate from college MagnaCumLaude with the whole ride paid for by the school? No, the school did not sponsor an Under Achiever's Olympics. What it did have was a series of little programs, all of which I figured out a way to fit. A Round Peg in a Square Hole It'll fit if you are creative about it. That's the key to getting scholarships and grants. You may be a round peg, and the scholarship may be that square hole, but if you look at it creatively, you can see a way in which you fit the criteria. It took me a while to figure it out, but I found it was not impossible, and I'll tell you how it can be done. RESEARCH Research is the most important first step. Don't give up till you know every possible grant and scholarship source. Check online, check off. If you live in a large town, hit the local grant seeker's library. The Foundation Center has these libraries in major cities. If you can't find one of these, hit the library, and the college libraries. Write down every possible, and many impossible sources. Then, research their criteria. You need to know that many of these grants and scholarships were set up by dead people, as a way to spend their money after they were gone. Maybe they had a cause. Maybe they just wanted to keep the money out of the clutches of Uncle Fred, it doesn't matter. What matters is that they specified criteria, some very general, some specific, which the scholarship seeker must meet in order to get the bucks. When I was doing it, I set the "academic excellence" grants aside, figuring I could maybe pick up some of them when I'd been in school a while. I started focusing on the ones for women, for re-entry women, and for "disadvantaged" people. The ones for disadvantaged people were usually, almost exclusively awarded to incoming racial minority students. But I looked at disadvantage creatively. How could I fit in? After all, I was a white looking girl from a rich suburb. Well, I thought, yes, but I was from one of the only poor families in that rich suburb. Once I found my hook, I wrote my essay based on that hook. I really didn't expect to get it. And if I didn't, what of it? I had a job in retail sales which was likely to last at least until I was too pregnant to do it. Guess what? It worked! So did the ones for re-entry women, and for women in general, for several other categories, and finally, the ones for academic excellence. For five years (the amount of time I took getting my BA) I supported myself and my child on scholarships and grants. I've told several of my friends about this, and encouraged them to do the same. Some of them have actually tried, and succeeded. In fact, I'd say the ones who tried, who loosened their thinking enough to go for something that was not obvious, and who worked at being the round peg who fit into the square hole, those people all managed to find funding. One of them even went on to become a professional fundraiser! Sure, there are simpler ways to find money for college. Loans and work study are much simpler. But going after grants and scholarships, even ones you don't think at first glance that you'd qualify for, and then approaching them creatively, can be a good challenge, and actually rewarding. Think of it, at least.  |
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