us information about how to find scholarship money for your college mrs bowen thank you i wanted to share this with everyone this morning because there was nobody there to teach me how to do it and i want to make sure that you have an opportunity to  advantage of the things that i've discovered over the years in terms of finding scholarship money there are a number of tools that are available to anyone looking for scholarships i use search engines there are a number of them out there there are free ones there are ones that are for fee and in general i find that the fee ones don't bring you anything new but we'll look at that a little more closely we're going to talk about how to build a portfolio of essays so you don't have to reinvent the wheel every time we're going to look at some of the other requirements that you should have in place to prepare yourself to respond to scholarship opportunities building a resume and building an activity record in terms of finding scholarships want to talk first about search engines these are the three big e s and i have them on the screen in the order that i like them the best fast web cap ex and chegg now fast web is a general tool for finding scholarships ha ancillary purposes but for the most part it's just for finding scholarships cap ex is by and large a college match website that has a side function of finding scholarships and chad gives actually a textbook rental company that has a side benefit of finding scholarships i do find ones on cap ex and check that i do not always find on fast web but for the most part you'll see the same ones over and over this is an example of what a fast web member profile looks like this is the activity educational activities page in every case when you build your profile in any of these websites the more complex and complete your profile is the more matches that you'll get now sometimes that results in odd outcomes for example my son took a chance stance when he was seven so when i put jazz dance into his profile he suddenly got ballet scholarships so that was a little you have to do a little bit of screening but the more you put in the more matches you're going to get so the most important thing is to complete this as fully as possible this is an example of what the student activities page looks like on your fast web profile a fast web has a limited number of options for you to complete and sometimes that feels very frustrating because you want to go well what about the fact that my son fences i want that to show up on his profile well  fastweb you have options that you have and you don't have any others but when you go to for example the cap ex profile there is a much broader possibility for putting in other and that gives you the option to make some matches on cap ex that you might not get on fast web because fast web doesn't have that dimension so it's important to use all these tools and stack them up so that you have the maximum opportunities this is another component of the fast web member profile  it looks like there's some funny stuff on here it's asking about parent parent activities parent associations and memberships and other things like that this is important because there are many legacy scholarships available so if your parent went to a school there may be a unique opportunity for the child of a parent who went to a school if your parent is a member of a union if your parent is a member of a professional association or even in some cases a member of a profession that may open up to you other scholarships so the parent component page of the fast with a profile is equally important so don't give it short shrift in terms of scholarship matches this is an example of a scholarship match page there you can see here that this is the marble optics dot com scholarship as say that shows up as the first match on that particular page so if you saw that match and the data about it looked intriguing to you you would click through it this is the actual match page and this shows you who's providing it what the dollar value is what the deadline is and gives you a quick and dirty description of what's going to be required if you go ok i can do that that sounds interesting then you click through apply on their site you'll notice over on the right hand side the button that says will you apply now if you when you click on that button it gives you options like yes i'm interested no i'm not eligible  i applied or even i won this scholarship it's important to keep track of that because if you're not interested or you're not eligible for a scholarship if you don't put that in it's going to keep popping up for you if you put in that you're not interested in it then it's no longer going to kick up and you won't have to look at it every time when you see this is the subscription settings these are some of the options that you have for what information you want to receive from fast web and that will give you a screening tool so that if you don't want to receive certain things then you don't this is the comparable screen that we see on the cap ex website showing this one happens to be this is the page that shows you how you match up your sports activities on the cap ex website and again you want to be as complete as possible here on the cap ex website you see the sort of blank thing where you can put in leadership activities volunteer activities and the magical other you want to make the fullest possible use of that just because it's blank and not mandatory doesn't mean you don't want to use it because again you want your profile to be as complete as possible here is an interesting page on the capek's web site that i've not seen on others and this gives you an opportunity to talk more about your parents more about your background and what your goals are in terms of education because the higher you want to go the more scholarship opportunities are available to you and this is the piece at the bottom of cap ex that focuses on whether or not you would be eligible for need scholarships on the fastweb website that's not an option there's no need sort but on the cap ex website it can fold into your results options that are need based if you would happen to be eligible or marginally eligible i can even see what this one is this is that cap ex scholarship match page now cap ex has an interesting feature to it as you look at it you can see the title of it how many dollars when it's due the number of pencils tells you how much work it's going to be quick and dirty you don't have to think about it you don't have to examine the the match you can just look at that screen and know that this is going to be a lot of work or this is not going to be a lot of work the next column with the heads on it shows you how many students are expected to apply for that particular scholarship now as you might expect if there's no work there are lots of kids applying if there's a lot of work there are a lot of kids apply that but there are some places in between where it might be not so much work but not a lot of kids because they're unique characteristics to the eligible students and then the far right column again is that column that you can use to screen your results that says i applied for it i won it i'm not interested eligible so again that's what the results look like with a capital s now one of the scholarships that came up on the cap ex match was the american fire sprinkler association second chance scholarship con as you look at it it's got three pencils  and four heads so it's a fair amount of work and but there will be a lot of kids apply now one of the reasons that that's the case is that this particular scholarship in order to apply for it you have to go through  and answer a quiz so you read about component of fire sprinklers and then you answer quick question and you go through and you have to get all the quiz questions right in order to be eligible for the scholarship now that sounds like a pain in the took us but actually as you go through it it's pretty straightforward it's sort of like third grade you know you read the paragraph you answer the question you keep going so it's not a big deal but the fact that it's got three pencils discourages enough students that it becomes an easier scholarship to apply for this is the actual entry form for that particular scholarship and i showed you the beginning of the quiz section that shows you how you would actually go about answering  that these are the applicant eligibility requirements for that particular scholarship as you can see the gotta have a high school diploma a ged or equivalent have to be unrolled for the spring two thousand and seventeen session and the winner selection is not based on financial aid g p a or demographic criteria the financial aid is nice if you're not going to be eligible for financial aid the g p a is nice if your g p a isn't you know primo the demographic  looseness of this one is attractive because a lot of scholarships are city county state region based and this says we don't care where you live you can apply for this no matter what it does exclude relatives of these associations and past winners so gosh darned if you want it once you can't win it again this is an interesting one and i want to sort of show you some of the glitches can run into this is a very attractive scholarship called the mendez scholarship it's faith and service based it's only got two pencils so it's not a lot of work it's got four heads so there can be a fair number of people applying however in this particular scholarship you have to go on facebook and request permission to apply if you don't request permission to apply and you submit your entry anyway not only will your entry be rejected but you won't be allowed to apply for the next scholarship season so smack smack if you don't follow the rules this one is relatively unusual in that regard most scholarships don't want to be bothered with a two step process but this particular one they use this as a can you follow directions kind of screening tool so it becomes very important that you be able to follow direction this is the actual mendez scholarship application and if you happen to click through on this one you actually have to click through three different pages to get to that instruction that says you have to get permission to apply first so it's even a more in depth can you follow directions kind of screening tool and i'm paying particular attention to this one because i learned that lesson the hard way because we did not click through to the third page and get that special set of instructions and my son was barred from apply for the scholarship for the following season so i don't want you to makes a mistake ok this is a check match page  the fewest number of unique scholarships so that's why it's my third place web site but there are some on there that pop up every once in awhile they don't pop up elsewhere so i keep my child profile updated and check it every once in a while this is an example of a scholarship that came up on the check website foreclosure dot com scholarship program contest do twelve one of sixteen it's worth six thousand dollars and there are five scholarships available that's fairly motivational if you can get a six thousand dollars scholarship and there are five available that really increases your odds of success and so what you need to do at that point is take a look at what the essay requirements are this does not have the three pencils or the five heads you've got to sort of gauge that for yourself but at least this information is available here the foreclosure dot com scholarship did show up on the wed sort for me but it did not have the complete set of information so i actually had to flip through to the application to find out the information that shows up on the check page all by itself ok how to find scholarship money there is another tier of websites that are feed based now fee based shows up in a couple of ways i think this is the next one this is scholarship owl now this particular website  is very straightforward you pay a fee you get matches i did not sign up for this because in the sample matches i didn't see any scholarships that i didn't see in other websites there are other kinds of fee based websites there are little more tricky because they don't look like fee based scholarship websites they look like things like welcome to the national association of something something something and for ninety five dollars you can be a member of this organization and our scholarship matches if that's all that that organization can do for you that's probably not a good match however if that organization is going to represent more to you than just a scholarship access point then it's worth pursuing maybe worth pursuing for example my son was invited to join probably six honor societies the american society of something something one of them was of a widely recognized  society that would be a credential to him throughout his career was an engineering honor society so i paid the ninety five dollars so that he could accept that offer the scholarships to the benefit that he would get from that particular membership so it's important that you evaluate those fee for service websites to see whether or not they can do more for you than just scholarship matches now there are scholarship matches that may only be available through that society and again you need to evaluate if there are twelve thousand students granted admission to the society every year and they're offering one scholarship chances are probably not worth the ninety five dollars but if they're offering twenty scholarships and there are only two thousand students joining might be worth the money so you need to evaluate those fee for service web sites with a certain amount of wisdom this is an example of one of those kinds of societies that look like it's more than a scholarship match i have nothing against these websites i'm not saying you shouldn't do them i'm simply saying you need to evaluate them with wisdom to see if you're going to get more out them than a scholarship that now this particular one has a number of seminars that you can go to where you get to meet congress people for example or have access to state department officials so this particular one adds other things to the mix than just scholarship matches that may make it a very interesting choice ok how to find scholarship money building a portfolio of essays one of the things that you're going to see is as you do scholarship applications the same four or five questions appear over and over and over in some permutation what are your goals well you're going to have to answer that question in all of your college applications so you should have several versions of a what are your goals essay already available to you and the idea of building a portfolio is that because the same kinds of questions show up over and over and over again if you have that in your pocket and it changes just a little bit from what you wrote before you can whip out the old essay and it and it's ready to go now one of the things you need to pay attention to have a long one maybe thousand word essay that answers that question because you can always cut back from one thousand words to five hundred to fifty even to one hundred if you need to if all you have is one hundred essay and you need a thousand word essay that looks like an impossible task because you think that you've said everything you need to say in that hundred word essay so what on earth are you going to say for nine hundred more words if you start with a thousand word essay you can pull it back to the intermediate levels with relative ease so in addition to what are your goals one of them common ones is how are you going to improve the world and that sounds really squishy  going to be a wonderful human being and save all people from poverty well that's not really what they're asking you they're asking you how your career goals are going to enable you to make a positive change in the world and not just make a positive change in the world but make some specific impact i am going to study economics because i want to enable myself to help micro businesses get started in third world countries that's a very concrete chain of thinking so if you build that essay once thousand words again and then you have options to back it down with some ease how did you select your curriculum they do not want to hear that i took a p ten in high school and i wanted to be a chemist when i grew up that's not what they're asking you they're asking you what in gauged you what made you feel passionate what excited somerset camp experiences you had that made you say i just think i could do this forty hours a week for the rest of my life they really want to know what excited you and please do not say i could make the most money  that's really not what they want to know interesting lee in this essay look behind you look at the life you've led up to this point and say what have been my influences my grandfather served in world war two and his stories made me want to consider the air force academy or my mother is an engineer and the cases that she worked on made me want to be an engineer things like that so look behind you at components of your background that have influenced the path that you're setting yourself out on i don't say i have no idea what i want to be when i grow up that's not going to win any scholarships and even if you're not absolutely positive what you want to do i hope that by the time you're applying for college scholarships you have some idea of where your interests lie you don't have to shove yourself into a little tiny box but you should have some idea that i find stem fascinating or i find history fascinating or i am completely engaged when i hear a political discussion shift some kind of feel for what floats your boat  work with that in terms of developing that essay then you'll also find that there are frequently miscellaneous individual questions and as you go through this process you'll start to see the patterns of things coming over and over the point though is if you write an essay keep it just because you hated the writing assignment in english class and you did it in doesn't mean you shouldn't keep it so that you have it in your portfolio because you never know the question the english teacher made you write about may turn out to be very close to a scholarship application question and you will have had two thirds of your work already finished probably proof read and vetted by your teacher so here ahead of the curve when you say that data  i sort of went over this a little bit but i'm going to expand on it start with the biggest appropriate volume the most common essay requirements are seven hundred fifty words and five hundred words if you have a thousand you can address anything if you have a thousand word essay in it calls for twelve hundred words you know what that's not that hard to beef up so these are the most common levels that i would recommend that you keep if you had used sources even if the application you're doing doesn't require that you include a bibliography or footnotes keep a record of your sources because the next step location you do might call for resources or footnotes if you have the opportunity to cite a quotation and you have a footnote or an end make sure you keep that in your file because you can always use that again and you don't have to go fish for it find it and websites come up and go down and you may have found a really good quote and all of a sudden you can't use it because you can't find it anymore on the pages and cached whatever and if you have citations make sure that you keep track of them in the the activities that i meant or there's nothing worse than remembering you heard this awesome quote and can't put my finger on it so the way you do that is you capture it when you find it and then hold it and you have it ok there are some other ways to sort there are scholarships that require videos there are scholarships that require posters there are scholarships that require online postings tweets all kinds of things like that there are scholarships that you win by having all your friends vote for your submission then your ability to respond to those is a function of your personality my son would not do anything video or anything online so that limited him to scholarships th called for essays he was not interested in anything that required his friends to vote for him and so he didn't do any of those if you're serious video person go for it if you some of them will require that you build a website or post on a blog if that's your thing go for it those are great fit for you but if those are not your things then don't waste time beating yourself up about the fact you didn't apply for that's color shit it either works for you or it doesn't work for you ok we ran into one website that has to be posted on a university website in order for you to be eligible to submit an entry  for smaller schools they may be willing to work with you adding scholarship match on their scholarship website however larger schools will say we don't put anything linked to our scholarship website if we don't have enough scholarships that it's worth it for our students that became a barrier for my son there was a really attractive scholarship and he was not able to apply for it because he couldn't get his school to put it on their website so again it sort of like the click through three times on the mendez scholarship make sure you check out all the requirements and as you might guess i share this with you because he wrote a magnificent essay in response to that particular one and then he couldn't apply for it there are often other requirements that you have to pay attention to just click all the way through there are some of the other  maybe proof of acceptance to a school and proof of enrollment believe it or not that acceptance letter you get to the college of your choice is not something you put away in your memory box in the attic where you can't find it again because we've encountered six or seven scholarships where even though my son is in his senior year in college he still had to provide his letter of acceptance prove it in roman is something that most bursar websites can produce automatically unless you're the school's website changes over and it goes down for six months like ours did other requirements maybe waited and waited g p a they may demand that information for both high school and college so be aware that you may need that from your high school experience then we get to class ranking peers township will provide you will provide the school or the scholarship with your percentage standing that you're in the top twenty percent the top three percent whatever it is my experience that there is not a class ranking available so be aware of that and you may need to talk to the scholarship office about that you may need transcripts and there may be a restriction on the type of transcript that is required whether it has to be an official whether it can be an official that you receive  scan or whether it can be an unofficial that you print off the website you made recommendations evaluations from ploy or pay attention to the requirements of the scholarship and we're probably not going to have time t about resumes start building it when you are in third or fourth grade on you can always keep a rolling record of the things that you've done and accomplished and drop off the oldest one but every once in a while knowing what you did in third or fourth grade can come into play and if you don't have a record of it you're out of luck we're going to go to a commercial right oh i'm sorry we're going to go to a commercial i'm naomi judd and i love my dogs but disasters like hurricanes and floods and tornadoes hits another animals injured abandoned or lost american h cared about and i'd be over thinking about what happened in iraq three months ago they're almost like a stranger when you come that everything is different to your kind of discombobulated people were asking me how it was but i got the sounds they've couldn't relate to what i had been through so i just stopped talking about it it made a tremendous difference in my life tonight chose to get help in hindsight it probably saved my life save my marriage i personally believe that i'm also a better soldier sometimes when you come home you can see negative distressing concern you can all be out soon will be got you're not going to be the same person afterwards that you were before you deployed and don't try to be accept who you are now figure out how to move forward and make that pos bowman for the second half of our show there were a few things that you were going through and i just wanted to back you up a little bit so that we could talk about the g p a a little bit more in depth and slow down because i know a lot of kids are interested in hearing about how this impacts where they're going in scholarship opportunities so if you would please explain the g p a absolutely schools understand colleges understand perfectly well that different schools use different weighting systems so many times when you get a scholarship application that you're completing you need to use either a weighted g p a or an unweighted g p a and the guidance office can provide both when you work with scholarship application you may be required to provide your high school information your college information if you took college classes while you were in high school and that generated a separate transcript you may need to obtain transcripts from those colleges the thing that's really important is that when we're looking at a transcript it goes back to all courses that you took at the high school whether you took them in sixth grade or seventh grade or eighth grade or nine through twelve all of those grades apply in determining what your weighted g p a is so there is no moment no moment when it doesn't matter  so we need to start paying attention to these things in third fourth fifth grade so that students understand the significance of everything that they do that there is no moment when what they're doing in school doesn't count  and so your g p a gets built sometimes in ways that surprise students and they really need to pay attention to that over time one of the things that i learned the good way is that if a second school accepted courses from a first school in transfer you don't necessarily have to go and get a transcript from the first school why might you want to do that well for example i'll give you specifics my son took a course at the university of north dakota penn state accepted it in transfer so he didn't have to go back and get a university of north dakota transcript if you didn't want to but here's the issue penn state accepted it as a pass fail class so the fact that he got an a plus on the course that he took at the university of north dakota will never show up on his penn state transcript so if that mattered to him in terms of selling the package then he did need to go back to the university of north dakota to get that transcript so that the grade itself showed up because otherwise the scholarship evaluators would see that only as a pass fail and pass fail could be all bunch of different things that were not a plus so just because it was accepted in transfer and you don't have to does not necessarily mean you don't want to so keep that in mind class ranking we pretty much hit on you have the opportunity from peter township at least to get a percentage at this point class rankings are constructed only under extremely unusual circumstances and you the student will not receive that information so class ranking can get a little weird in terms of transcripts well gosh we just we just sort of covered that in terms of reaching back to schools that accepted courses and treats for it gets a little if you're doing college in the high school classes because you may or may not have a transcript of the college sponsoring the class that you took so you need to evaluate whether or not you you want to just leave that as a high school class or whether you want to go and pick up the transcript from the college at which a typical transcripts become a pain in terms of timing sometimes you may need a particular timing for your transcript like it may need to have spring semester in it it may not need to have spring semester in it that may determine when you request a transcript you may need an official one which comes from the college either directly to the scholarship or you may receive it in a sealed envelope and you are not permitted to open that envelope just gets attached in other circumstances you are allowed to open the official transcript scan it in and send them the scan there's always a watermark on the scholarship or on the transcript so that it is obvious to the scholarship committee that it is an official even if they're not touching it a surprising number of scholarships at least surprising to someone of my age is that many of them are completely electronic you mail nothing and for that reason they are more open to accepting a scanned official transcript because if they get an official transcript they have to touch a piece of paper which makes it not all electronic so we're seeing more and more of those some not so many will accept an unofficial transcript these are aware that when you get a scholarship application that says this is what we want from you you will not get brownie points for sending them things they did not ask for in fact your application may be disqualified if you send them things they did not ask  for their i have seen scholarship applications that had a warning on them that said do not send us a transcript we will ask for a transcript later if we need one that means there expect to get three thousand applications they're going to pull it down to the top fifty and no students will be asked to send a transcript but you could actually get a very good application rejected for sending things they didn't ask for that doesn't get you brownie points it gets you mr young points to merits or demerits there is in terms of letters of recommendation this is a real challenge for the teachers you're going to ask it teachers get bombarded particularly in the third and fourth quarters for the year with requests for letters of recommendation there are several things that come into play for one thing it's not so much a high school but it will be in college when you're asking for recommendations if you're one of three hundred students and you're off your teacher doesn't know you from adam and eve then it's going to be tough to persuade them to give you a letter of recommendation at the high school level the classes are much smaller it's not as much of an issue but if your teacher needs to know something special about the life that you've led then it behooves you as a student to make sure that you build a relationship with that teacher so that they know those things  may ask a high school teacher to prepare a generic letter of recommendation to whom it may concern with or without a date maybe it just says of two thousand and seventeen whatever but you may ask them to prepare a generic letter of recommendation so you don't have to hit on them sixteen times that would be very nice doesn't always work you should when you talk to a teacher to request a letter of recommendation spend some time with them asking if they have constraints for example if they say i can prepare a generic letter of recommendation and i will keep it in my computer so that i can generate one for you with an updated date but that's all i'm going to have time to change you need to be aware of that you may have a need that you need to advise the teacher of when you request a letter it may need to be on a special form it may need to have an online submission and the teacher may say i would love to help you but i just don't have time to do that right now i may be able to do it in six weeks but if that's not going to work for your timing you need to let me know that now so that you can move on and ask somebody else we have we ran into one scholarship where it required that the first words of the scholarship be some very artificial construct that nobody would ever use and that was so that the scholarship committee knew for sure that they were getting a special letter recommendation it was really annoying it was sort of a pain but it was the requirement so you had to fulfill it so you need to have a relationship with the teachers you're going to ask so that they're not going to feel put upon more than the minimum amount that they already feel put upon to get that keep relationships with your high school teachers for the first or second years of college because you may need to go back to them if the only courses that you've taken in college have had three hundred kids in the class i'm sorry your teachers in college are not going to be able to give you a letter of recommendation they don't know you are so you may need to reach back those first couple of years of college and ask your high school teachers for recommendations so be burning any bridges in terms of evaluations you may need a performance evaluation from your current employer you may need evaluations from your former employers so again don't burn any bridges and they may need to be on a special form so what you'll want to do is as you enter summer internships a may i have your permission to contact you when i need an evaluation of my performance for a scholarship application now unless your employer is a bear that's probably not going to be a problem as long as you give them a heads up in the beginning and of course that presupposes that you've been an exemplary employee and lest you think that working fast food or as a lifeguard in the summer are irrelevant employments and you would never need a recommendation from those situations don't go so fast even if you're working fast food the fact that you were always on time you were always in your uniform your uniform was always clean  were always present on those kinds of things are sadly noteworthy in that employment setting and may give you the opportunity to ask your fast food boss for a letter of recommendation or a letter of evaluation that can play an important your scholarship and i want to get to something that is not scholarship but it's really really important and that is treat the people around you with respect if you go dissing your boss behind his back trust me he or she is going to find out your boss is your boss treat them with respect because even if that isn't the right thing to do which it is you may need them at some point in the future so you just need to think of everything you do today as having implications down the road and you cannot treat them cavalierly because they could be really important to you so ok back on task that's sort of my building a resume it's also known as a curriculum i don't know why people get off on using funky latin phrases when they really mean as a resume but they do use those terms interchangeably you should have two resume maybe three and i've got them on the screen here in sort of the wrong order you may first well you should always have a complete resume that is everything on it that you ever did in your whole life from the time you could walk because you never know when you're going to need to know that so keep a complete resume it could be i know you're nice cool it could still be four or five pages long keep a record of everything because trust me the thing that's so memorable you'll never forget it today is forgotten as soon as that totally memorable thing happens next week so keep a complete resume you're going to need to know things like how many years did you do something what peer mediation role as early as you did those things can be a play when your applying for a scholarship so it should be complete then you're going to need a version that only has the last three years of  stuff because the things you did in middle school are not the same as the things you did in high school and you're going to encounter situations where they only want to know the last three years the last four years whatever and then you also need to have a one page resume because you're going to encounter circumstances where you're constrained to one page and you should have that ready to go because if you have to do it on the spot it can be really challenging so have those three versions of your resume you may encounter situations where you need a special focus rsum like only tell me about your leadership experience or only tell me about your service experience and you can use that complete one that you've built and that you've maintained all these years and it's easy to squish it down if you're having to fish for information to build that special focus resume because you haven't built your complete one it may not be complete may not be accurate so those are the four ways that you may need to maintain a resume this is different from a record of employment education comes first experience comes second then awards and honors activities and service and then the final thing you show on the resume is software and tools that you can use that may be if you're in the media lab that may be special kinds of equipment that you can use if you're an engineer it may mean that you've got a little cad experience if you're working in robotics it means you've use these two or three robotics programming tools those kinds of things awards and honors at timothy's and service can cross over you can have an activity that was service for which you received an award yes show it three times nothing wrong with that if the scholarship package says only show things one time then place them so that you show balance if you have six awards and only one service then you want to kick the service award down and service so that you show some balance it's a visual thing if they're asking you for three categories they expect to see some activity in each the three categories and so you need to be able to make that response again if you have the complete thing you can sort so if you have an activity that was service and you got an award then you're going to show that three times on your full resume so that you don't forget that you got an award for that in terms of addressing activities and experience scholarship scenarios are looking for a whole bunch of different things they like to see variety they like to see students who have some f letter x and some academics and some are it's doing all kinds of different things because it exposes you to all kinds of different people they want to see persistence and duration when your in middle school if you do a shotgun approach and you try one of those in one of those in one of those that's ok as you move through high school you should start to find what floats your boat and you should see two or three or even four years of activity in that if you've tried out for something and haven't made it and you keep trying out and you keep trying at it maybe you don't make it until your senior year there is respect built in to showing in your record the fact that you tried and tried and tried and one or got in or whatever because that's really something that you wanted to do now i would suggest that if you tried tried and tried never got in you probably don't want to include that one but if you tried tried tried it out in that something that  performance in academics and so academic activities gives you a skill set that prepares you for dealing with those i am openly biased in favor of academic activities over sports activities  that's me i get that i acknowledge that bias but i do have it there are a lot of academic activities that will provide you with life skills and those are things that position you to be more attractive as a student more attractive as an employee and give you more options in your future if you have athletic experience you need to make sure that you have track of the records that you've achieved the records that your team achieved and the standings that you achieved and your team achieved because they will fade with time and you better get it right if you are not providing accurate information and completely innocently inaccurate information can still disqualify you from a whole bunch of stuff if it's found out that you put something incorrect on your application service activities are very important mind numbingly grinding service timothy's not so much it's preferred that there be a focus on what you do i care about hunger and so you can see in middle school i worked in the at the food bank and then from in high school i did these more significant things to deal with hunger so even your service work should be you know a little focused about what you want not not so much scattered and if you have faith based activities  identify them you will never be dishonored for having a faith based activity now you may feel that you don't want to show a faith based activity if it reveals something about your faith position that you're concerned would cause you problems that's fine chances are your faith based activities are also service centered you can simply say i work for the homeless network if you're concerned about getting pigeonholed you don't have to say it was through the church or through the synagogue or through the temple you can simply say i worked with homeless families so you can balance those issues by and large i've never encountered a circumstance where a faith based on service activity had a penalty attached to it scheduling transcripts have lead time schools will not even promise them sooner than six weeks so you need to budget six weeks lead time for recommendations the people that you are hitting on for recommendations have other things to do with their lives so calling them on tuesday and telling them that you have a friday deadline for a recommendation is not going to help you down the road even if they're willing to bend over backwards to get you a recommendation for friday they may not be really interested in working with you in the future so provide some lead time for recommendations and there are a couple of scholarships that require that your service  occurred in the previous three weeks ok so plan ahead if this is a scholarship you want to apply for then figure out when you're going to do your service and apply for the bloody scholarship within three weeks otherwise you have to do something else so sometimes you have to back into your timing i'm going to step on my soapbox again for pete's sake if somebody gives you a recommendation thank them it's even nicer if you give them a written thank you email if you must but thank god they don't owe you squat they are doing you a favor they may be doing you a favor that gets you thousands of dollars for your education the least you can do is take a half hour and write them thank you note if you bake them about to cookies go for it but at the very least express your gratitude because they don't owe you a thing now in gauging in this kind of scholarship hunt is requires the same diligence as the first day of deer season you plan ahead you gather your equipment you exercise discipline at my house the rule was you had to apply one scholarship per month during the school year and one per week during the summer and you're groaning i can hear your groaning from here the fact of the matter is if you build that into your schedule then it becomes relatively painless and you get really good at it it may only take you a few minutes to pull up that essay for your portfolio it is a little bit cut it down customize it to the scholarship plonk it on the email pop it out you may be able to turn around a scholarship application in twenty minutes or less if you get used to the process so exercise the discipline if this is what you want there is an extraordinary amount of scholarship money out there that goes  claimed every single year and i don't want one of those dollars to escape you if you could have got them so if you follow the steps and use the screening tools and prepare yourself and line yourself up and exercise the discipline i can celebrate the fact that entirely with no internal scholarships outside scholarships my son's college tuition last semester was twenty five hundred dollars it's everything else there are scholarships so he was very involved with writing scholarships throughout high school and i remember his pain when he was writing his color shift if you had i school but i remember also there being a large amount of money senior year that he had accrued from beginning to write these scholarships when do you recommend that students begin to write when did i mean scholarship when did they start is it start senior year or does it start back when you're in ninth grade or does it start even further back second grade second grade second grade the washingtonian bar association has a law day contest that is open to actually in that particular case kindergartners in up while i'm not sure drawing a bookmark in kindergarten would actually do you too much in the scottish about legation but certainly starting in second grade participation in the reflections competition through the p t a those are things that have at some point at some level they have cash awards attached to that or the v f w runs patriots pen for middle school and voice of democracy for high school there's something out there in the duck unlimited has a design competition that i think is open to the fourth grade in up so you start in second grade do you stop once you get to college my son will be starting graduate school in january and he has done for graduate school scholarship applications in the past month wow so no as long as you're in school there's money out there to help you do it right no sense in going no sense in paying it if you can get  remember when i was in college way back in the old days and orville redenbacher gave a thousand to hold her scholarship to women who were my age re entering the college so that was something that you know i wrote and i thought well this is kind of silly but nevertheless i got the money there you go i mean i agree with you leave no stone unturned and something that may not seem like you qualify for mice my personal idea has always been throw the spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks absolutely because you never know  circumstances are unlike you touched on the unmet scholarships and those unmet scholarships you know that money just sits there that money says or if you make the slightest effort you might be that person who qualifies for that scholarship without you know really thinking that you're got that you have much of a position for right the other thing is it appears to mean i don't have anything except that it appears to me that there is a snowball effect whether it's with honors or with scholarship applications  that if you win one then it it looks like wow they're really good and you know it's easier to win the second one and the like they're really really good and it's easier to win the third one and i don't know that that's the case but if you have a resume that shows that you've already won x y z i mean that has to have some weight i mean just from a realistic standpoint i think when you're applying to college and college gives you a package you can always negotiate with college be it might be your preferred school to say well college a has offered me right x y and z what are you going to give me that's absolutely right so my suggestion would be no matter what your age is if you're going to school get started now get organized build your portfolio build your resume and exercise just supplant exercise discipline that's a good one so that mental discipline i think is a difficult one for everybody unless you get in the habit of doing it so do you have any other information that you'd like to share with students before we wrap this up for the day well actually i think i'm about talked out oh ok so students i think some of the key points made for us is that it's never too early to begin writing essays to begin because you also hone on your writing skills even far back as far back as second grade so you improve your writing skills and you begin writing the essays and you begin applying for money as early as probably middle school start you know competing in some of the academics competitions that might also garner you some money later on in the game and also build that resume make it meaningful make them make the resume meaningful and make several versions of it so that you have something that you're going to be able to play with when the time comes starting senior year is not a good idea you always hear students talk about that crunch and how it is so busy that first semester don't wait and don't leave the scholarship piece until that time so with nothing more i'd like to thank mrs bowman for joining us today and sharing her wealth of knowledge i personally know that mrs bowman's children garnered a lot of money through scholarship writing