If you or your child are hoping to attend college anytime soon, cost is likely top of mind. Top schools continue to increase tuition while many young adults fall deeper and deeper into debt. By the second quarter of this year, outstanding U.S. student loan debt topped $1.8 trillion, according to the Education Data Initiative.
To keep costs down, prospective students could ideally win several scholarships. But that can be easier said than done.
However, Carlynn Greene has done it — and she suspects you can too.
Greene won 30 scholarships to attend both undergraduate and graduate school at the University of North Texas, graduating with no debt and degrees in broadcast journalism and public relations, advertising and applied communication.
She’s put those skills to use, working as a full-time content creator and the founder of Scholarship Guru, through which she’s helped clients secure millions of dollars in scholarship awards.
“There are a lot of mistakes people make when it comes to scholarships,” Greene says. Among the biggest, she says, is failing to put your best foot forward to in your essay.
“I always tell my students that you want to try and approach it as if you were marketing yourself, because a lot of the principles that we learn from marketing can be applied to scholarships,” she says. “Because you’re trying to convince someone as to why they should invest in your education over someone else that’s competing against you.”
Here’s what Greene sees as the most common mistakes applicants run into when applying for scholarships — and how you can avoid them.
1. Focusing on national scholarships
It’s going to be hard for anyone — no matter how strong their essay — to stand out amid an enormous applicant pool, Greene says.
“Nine times out of 10, when people are starting out, they’re applying for the ones that have very broad eligibility,” she says.
And while these national scholarships can come with five- or six-figure rewards, “you are much more likely to win scholarships that are local, state level and also ones that I like to call intersectionality scholarships.”
By that, she means awards with multiple criteria that may describe you, including race, gender, geographic location and area of study. “That will narrow down the competition pool,” she says.
2. Not treating yourself like a hot commodity
Greene recommends imbuing your application materials with concepts from the world of marketing: scarcity and urgency. In essence, how are you or your academic goals unique — and why should you receive funding now?
A medical student, for instance, may want to highlight that they plan to specialize in treating a rare and deadly disease, Greene says.
“If you find relevant data, like from a news article or research article that points this out and highlights it, that would communicate to the audience, the judges, that investing in your education makes more sense, as opposed to someone who perhaps is going into, let’s say, plastic surgery,” she says.
3. Only applying to a handful of scholarships
It can be easy to get discouraged if you fail to win scholarships you were hoping for, but Greene says it can be a numbers game, even for excellent applicants.
“I won 30 scholarships, but I applied for a little over 100,” she says. “I’ve had another student, she won 20 scholarships. She applied for a little over 200. So it just depends.”
In addition to her website, Greene recommends using online tools such as Bold.org and Going Merry to find scholarships that meet your criteria and that you can apply for in bulk.
Overall, for an average student, Greene recommends applying for anywhere from 100 to 200 scholarships.
“It can seem overwhelming, but when you compare it to even applications in the job market now, a lot of people are applying for hundreds of jobs,” she says.
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