As a student, you are required to prepare for one of the most important times of your life – university. Many things go into that preparation that takes up more than half of your day. For many, scholarships are the biggest stress, not only because it’s one of the most important, but also because it’s not easy to find scholarships let alone win them.
Through the extra funding, scholarships allow you to focus and improve on your studies. It opens your world to grand opportunities that’ll help you develop as a person for society and for yourself. In all of those ways scholarships are very important to not just you but your family. It removes a lot of stress, so here are some methods that’ll help you use most of your time applying instead of taking too long to find scholarships.
Narrowing the search
Beginning at an obvious one, you should always narrow down your search to either the country you are from or the country you want to study in. For example, you’re a Nigerian who wants to study in Europe. It’s either you search scholarships for Nigerians in which you can end up finding private scholarships that give the award to you, or search scholarships in Europe that will lead you to many university scholarships which often have sections just for international students.
Factors effecting your search
Starting your search with the category of countries will definitely help narrow down your option to scholarships you are more likely to be eligible for, although with other factors this often won’t be nearly enough. You will find that many scholarship categories will depend on you as an individual. For example how well you did in your education(specifically your high school education), your country, your academic achievements, and your personal achievements. If you had excellent grades in your senior secondary years, then that makes you amongst those who surely will find scholarships effortlessly. In American universities, they divide their scholarships into merit and need based scholarships. Merit based is for impressive academic achievements while need based as inferred by the name is for students who have financial need in accordance to rules set by their university.
Types of scholarship
If you have average grades like the larger majority of students, you can you search scholarships based on special talents. You may have a musical or athletic talent, so your university may narrow down their options through that. Another commonly known thing is searching scholarships based on the degree you will be taking. Some degrees have noticeably more available scholarships than others. That is caused by the fact of their high demand. For example STEM, business, medicine, education, and art fields. So if your degree happens to be one of those you’ll find yourself having more luck. Competition type scholarships, as the name suggests is a batch of online competitions open to most people and generally give out the cash personally to the winners. A commonly known one is the Paradigm challenge, where you can work as a team or alone for a cash prize of potentially $10,000 considering you are able to come up with an economically beneficial idea and plan. The age range is very wide, so many people can enter but that also means more competition, exactly why it is always best to apply to as many as u can.
Scholarship websites
Lastly, there are websites that help greatly with the search. Take our website Annual scholarships for example, there are various international scholarships that re-open yearly. Various websites basically do the search for you and categorize it in a very convenient way that’s simple and easy to browse through. Even the websites, many of them are different from each other because they pivot around one type of scholarship. Could be annual, international, country specific, ability specific etc.
At the end of the day it’s necessary to know your strength and weakness to search for a scholarship efficiently in order to not waste half your time searching around and end up with scholarships that you aren’t eligible for. Follow these tips mentioned above and you are sure to find one. Don’t forget, plenty of them will require you to have either some kind of talent or academic achievement. It is all up to you to find the one you are the right or even perfect fit for. Remember, it is important to be patient too because this process was not meant to be easy but worth it.
