Need Money? Search for Scholarships!

Holiday breaks are a great time for students to search for scholarships since they don’t have any homework and many scholarship applications are available for the upcoming school year. Some GU applications are available now and are due shortly after the start of the Spring Semester, so have your student do the legwork now and avoid the rush.

Current GU Students will want to watch the morning mail (a daily email) as many scholarship opportunities notices are posted there. I also encourage students to meet with their Academic Advisor to see if there are any scholarships available either through their department, or by organizations within their field of study.  Some departments that offer scholarships are the School of Business, School of Engineering and the Alumni Association.

The Financial Aid Office has a new scholarship database of scholarships offered by outside organizations.  Keep checking the database as new scholarships get added and scholarships whose deadlines have passed will no longer appear online.  You can find the database online at http://www.gonzaga.edu/Campus-Resources/Offices-and-Services-A-Z/Student-Financial-Services/Financial-Aid/scholarshipsearch.asp.

The web is a great resource, be aware of the information you share.  A few tips to make the scholarship search process more successful:

• If a website requires your student to register an email address, have them use a separate email account that they use specifically for scholarships as they will get junk mail from the site, so don’t let it bog down their personal account.
• Just be wary of any organization that requires an application fee, even if they guarantee results or your money back: I can assure you that you won’t get either.
• If your student finds a scholarship that they are eligible for, or that the application deadline has passed, have them save that information in a file, so next year they can easily find the website/application without having to try and remember what website they were on when they saw it last year.

There is an abundance of websites offering free scholarship searches; some sites you may find helpful are: www.thewashboard.org, http://scholarshipamerica.org, and www.osac.state.or.us.

Wishing you much success in your scholarship searching!