It is always recommended that students exhaust all scholarship options before accepting any federal financial aid or loans. But where do you look for scholarships?
We got you. Here’s a few of our favorites.
1. Sallie Mae
Sallie Mae is one of the most well-known private student loan companies in the game. To support students in making smart financial decisions, Sallie Mae also offers a free Scholarship Search tool.
After registering, the tool will send you customized alerts to notify you of new available scholarships that match your unique profile. You can also manually search for scholarships that match your interests, skills, and activities.
And wait – it gets better! All students registered with Sallie Mae’s Scholarship Search tool will be automatically entered to win $1,000 in their monthly sweepstakes.
2. Scholarships.com
Scholarships.com is one of the most established scholarship websites, having reported nearly $19 billion in scholarships. The site allows you to create a profile then uses that information to match you with scholarships you should apply to.
You can also search by college, state, and a variety of other areas to narrow down your search.
3. Chegg.com
Chegg is well-known for it textbook rentals and homework help, but it’s also a great resource for scholarships. In total, Chegg offers more than 25,000 scholarships and tutors to help review students’ scholarship essays.
4. Fastweb.com
Fastweb is a unique scholarship search engine, claiming to have over 1.5 million scholarships in its database. Similar to how Scholarships.com works, you can create a profile and the tool will find the scholarships that best match your background. Fastweb will even email you those matches along with the deadlines so you can keep up and never miss a scholarship!
5. Niche.com
Niche.com provides insight on colleges and universities using over 140 million reviews and ratings from real students and families. The site also offers a wide variety of scholarships, using a similar matching process to Scholarships.com and Fastweb.
Niche will pair students with scholarships that match their background, interests, and qualifications. A large majority of the scholarships on Niche are also no-essay (oh yeah!).
6. Cappex.com
Cappex provides a wide variety of scholarship opportunities, but what makes it most unique is its Calculator Tool. The tool allows students to calculate their chances of getting into prospective schools. While not the end-all-be-all, the tool is helpful because it can allow you to see whether or not you might get into schools that offer more scholarship money and how much additional leg work you might need to do.
Cappex’s database offers more than $11 billion in scholarships, allowing students to search via a variety of factors.
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Insider Tips from the Nest:
Create a new, separate email account just for applying to scholarships. This is important for a few reasons:
- Your regular email won’t be flooded with scholarship emails.
- You can put all of your essays and application materials into folders (like on Google drive!) and keep them in one place.
- You won’t have to individually unsubscribe from every single scholarship website after you’re done, you can just log out of the email!