Applying for scholarships is a grueling task most students know well, which often amounts to no or little results. However, changing where students apply for scholarships can increase their odds of being awarded one.
Students should use external scholarship search websites as a last resort. Instead, they should focus most of their time on internal scholarships offered by Texas State or organizations they’re involved with.
An external or outside scholarship is a scholarship offered by anyone other than the college the student attends. Whereas an internal scholarship would come from the university the student attends.
Ian Ixba, a psychology sophomore, has managed to secure enough scholarships to cover their entire tuition and did so through multiple internal scholarships.
“I’ve been really privileged to have been offered internal scholarships like the Terry Traditional, President’s Honors and the National Hispanic Scholarship, all of which came from Texas State and the first which came from our scholarship portal, BOSS,” Ixba said. “Because of that, I’ve been able to cover all of my tuition, and I’m really thankful and lucky to say that.”
Admission scholarships from Texas State are the least time-consuming because you don’t have to do anything besides meet the qualifications, which are often based on high school performance, such as test scores and class rank.
Some examples of assured scholarships are the President’s Honor Scholarship, the Texas State Achievement Scholarship, the Texas State Distinguished Scholarship and the Texas State Merit Scholarship. These scholarships are also automatically renewable if you meet the requirements, which means less time applying to scholarships annually.
However, not everyone will meet the qualifications for an admission scholarship, and they do not often cover full tuition. This is where competitive scholarships, which can be found at the Bobcat Online Scholarship System (BOSS), should come in next.
The scholarships offered on BOSS may be competitive, but the applicant pool is still going to be much smaller than external scholarships. For example, the National Merit Scholarship has around 1.6 million applicants, whereas at Texas State, scholarships are only given to students.
“Since it’s more localized, there are significantly less people applying, increasing your odds,” Ixba said. “You have connections, networks and shared experiences here that are established before you even submit a scholarship, so you have a massive advantage. Generally, I recommend submitting to BOSS every year when it becomes available.”
Oftentimes, you need to be involved in a specific major or organization to apply for competitive scholarships, so be sure to be involved on campus while also checking BOSS frequently to see what scholarships become available.
The types of scholarships students should spend the least amount of time on are ones found on sites such as Bold.org, Scholarships.com and Nitrocollege.com. Even organizations that reach out by mail, such as the National Society of Collegiate Scholars, may not be worth applying to.
“There are a lot of external scholarships online, but they can be highly saturated with no essay scholarships and exciting opportunities that actually end up having a really low return on interest,” Ixba said. “With scholarships, the goal is to look in a more profitable area, and for me, that more profitable area has been internal scholarships at Texas State.”
Not only is the applicant pool for scholarships on these sites way bigger than scholarships offered by organizations at Texas State, but they may also be taking advantage of college students.
According to the Hechinger Report, scholarship websites “pass along email addresses, phone numbers and home addresses to marketing partners, such as colleges and textbook companies, and students soon find themselves getting calls and emails they didn’t know to expect. Colleges and publishers pay anywhere from a couple of dollars per click to hundreds of dollars for students’ personal information.”
If you don’t want to be pestered by tons of emails from scholarship websites and whoever they sold your information to, and instead want to actually increase your odds of receiving a scholarship, spend most of your time applying to internal scholarships from Texas State and its organizations.
–Jayce Jackson is a journalism sophomore
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