College Scholarships... "Personal Attributes"? (vanity)

FastWeb ^ | November 19, 2007 | Sopater

[Sopater]

I was filling out a form to register my son for consideration for academic scholarships to college. I was amazed to see what this website considers "personal attributes".

Student's personal attributes
Select up to 5 items.

• Adopted
• Against the Death Penalty
• Bilingual
• Birth mother who has placed a child for adoption
• Bisexual
• Canadian Citizen
• Cancer, Siblings Diagnosed With
• Cathedral Home for Children, Former Resident
• Clinically Overweight
• Displaced Homemaker
• Domestic Abuse, Victim/Survivor of
• Drug Conviction (Misdemeanor or Felony)
• Farm, Raised On
• Feminist
• Foster Care Recipient
• From Small Town <25,000 Population
• Gay / Lesbian
• Head Of Household
• Height: Women, 5'10" or above; Men 6'2" or above
• Last Name Van Valkenburg
• Mobile Home Park Resident
• Orphan (Parentless)
• Parent
• Parent of Multiples (Twins, Triplets, etc.)
• Parent, Student With Dependent Child(ren)
• Political Party: Democrat
• Political Party: Republican
• Public Assistance Recipient
• Public Housing Resident
• Reservation, Resident of
• Residence Hall Resident (Dormitory)
• September 11, Affected By Tragedy
• Single Parent
• Spanish Speaking
• Student, One of Multiples (Twins, Triplets, etc.)
• Survivor of Domestic Violence
• Transgender
• Vegetarian

(emphasis added)

[Sopater]

Are these online sites the best places to find out what scholarships are available? What is the best way to get a comprehensive list of available scholarships?

Thanks for your help.

[underground]

The online sites are a good starting point but it doesn’t always find all the smaller local awards. Its impossible to get everything into one place, but as far as I know the online website are the only ones seriously trying to.

The high schools’ and colleges’ financial aid and advising offices are also good resources but some of their information might be out of date since they rarely have staff dedicated to researching awards and just have flyers that they have received from different organizations. A lot of schools will refer the students to us, but they should have some high-school specific award information. Each college should also have a complete list of scholarships unique to that school, but that won’t include other state and local residency awards.

The state’s Education Departments or Higher Education Commissions will usually have good links to the awards funded and authorized by the state’s legislature and local charities. I work on the Texas awards and there’s literally hundreds of different ways you can become eligible for state aid. Other states may not be so generous..

You can also just try typing in all the keywords of the student’s eligibility into Google. Like: varying combinations of the word scholarship with “hometown” “major” “high school name” “hobby/sport”

[underground]

updating/bookmarking this thread

I've been messing around with a custom Google engine that will search through only non-commercial websites. I've implemented it on my financial aid site with some advice on how to search college scholarships with it.

Results are a little rough, but it skips the sign-up and data-collection/sales phases of some of the other commercial databases