From the dewiest-eyed freshman still learning his way to the dining hall to the battle-tested senior already halfway through her thesis, most students would welcome some extra cash. And yet, a significant number of students don't bother applying for financial aid while attending college. Find out what current college students at all levels should do to ensure maximum financial help.
Keep Filing Your FAFSA
One of the best (and easiest!) ways to ensure you’re receiving all of the aid you qualify for is by submitting your Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) each and every year. If you’ve filled out the FAFSA before, you can use the Renewal FAFSA, a shorter (and quicker!) version. Most colleges review financial aid applications on a first-come, first-served basis, so file your FAFSA as soon as you can after January 1 (filing before this date will result in a rejection).
“I think a lot of students receive some or no financial aid when they begin college, and [later] there are significant shifts in their family’s financial circumstances,” says Jim Sumner, dean of admissions and financial aid at Grinnell College. “I worked with a student who qualified for no need-based when he entered college. His sister entered a different college the very next year. All of a sudden, each one of them was eligible for more than $15,000 in aid. ”
Many colleges also use your FAFSA to determine if you’re eligible for need-based aid, another excellent reason file one every year.
Merit & Departmental Scholarships
Merit scholarships are typically offered by academic departments. And campus e-mail is a popular means of publicizing them. Joanne Rinaldi, a senior at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, recently applied for a scholarship she learned about in an e-mail from the department of natural resources and environmental science. “I get updates from my department about certain things, so I don’t go and ask them, they send out stuff,” she says.
Michelle Wong, a senior advertising and marketing major at the Fashion Institute of Technology, says she won two scholarships that she discovered through her department’s e-mail newsletter. “They send out a mass mailing and they say, ‘If you want to apply for this scholarship and if you meet these requirements, then you have until this date," she says. Wong notes that no one spoke to her directly about any available awards; had she never received the e-mails, she would not have known about her school’s scholarship. So read through those department e-mails -- there might be scholarship opportunities in there!
Where else can you go to find scholarship opportunities from your college? “Talk to your department chair, talk to your academic advisor and talk to the financial aid office,” says Sumner. Pay special attention to the opportunities sponsored by your academic department. “As students zone in on their major, they should ask about departmental scholarships. Sometimes even professors in a given department don’t know about them, but the financial aid office does,” he says.
Staying Motivated
You know where to find scholarships, but finding the motivation to apply is another story. College independence means no one can stop you from ordering pizza at 2 a.m., it also means no one will hang over your shoulder to make sure you complete scholarship applications.
As Sumner puts it, “We’ve taken the attitude that a lot of colleges have, and that is we want to increasingly treat the student as an adult and deal directly with the student and focus less on the parent.” Translation? It’s up to you to take responsibility and search for aid on your own.
Battling procrastination isn’t easy, as Wong says, “In the beginning, I think your mindset is that you have so many new things in your face, and you don’t realize that if you just sat down two hours a week to apply for [scholarships], that would have been a bare minimum of a commitment."
Being proactive has its rewards. “Colleges respond when a student or parent asks,” Sumner says. “The student that comes into the financial aid office and says, ‘I’m dying financially,’ and we say, ‘You’re a good candidate for this prize.’ A ‘back-against-the-wall’ feeling makes students respond more quickly.”
There are additional scholarships floating around that you can apply for, even as a current college student. In addition to checking the resources at your college, review your scholarships in your FastWeb search results.
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