Online Scholarships Can Be Hard To Get

When you add "online" to the beginning of most phrases, it makes it sound convenient and easy. For many people, online shopping is easier than normal shopping because they can do it from home, and they can compare lots of prices quickly. That trend, unfortunately, does not extend to online scholarships.

Online scholarships are often small, and they usually require a written essay submission. Then, only a few people get chosen out of all the submissions to actually get the scholarship. However, if you do it right, online scholarships are not a waste of time.

You can look through databases of online scholarships and find the ones that offer higher amounts. A lot of them only offer $500 or $1000, but some of them offer $5000, $10000, and in rare cases, even more. If you pick and choose which ones are worth your time, you will probably waste less time trying to get these competitive scholarships. However, most people will be most drawn to the ones with bigger payouts, so they will be harder to actually win.

So, instead, some people opt to apply for lots and lots of small $500 and $1000 online scholarships instead. If you go this route, you could get more free money to go to college, but it will be very time consuming. You could spend the equivalent of a full-time job in hours trying to apply to every $500 and $1000 scholarship you find online. So, even with this strategy, you need to pick and choose which ones you believe are worth your time.

But, how do you find online scholarships, big or small, to begin with? There are actually several different databases of online scholarships. FastWeb is a popular one, but just as with the individual scholarships, a popular service could result in more competition. There are others, such as Choice Degree, DirectDegree, Free Degree Info, and more. Signing up to search and sort through several of them is probably a good idea, especially if you are looking for lesser known ones with less competition.

There is one more catch, though. The vast majority of the scholarships in all of these online databases have specific requirements as to who is eligible to enter. Some of the better databases, like FastWeb, will allow you to enter all the information you can to show you only the scholarships that you actually qualify to apply for. Be sure to fill that information out honestly, because if you win a scholarship that you are actually ineligible for, they could demand the money back if they find out.

So, be honest, be diligent, and work hard, and you can earn yourself a few online scholarships so that you can take out fewer student loans to go to college.