What is a Scholarship? 2

Where to locate the right sources for college scholarships?

It can be challenging and highly competitive to obtain free money for college. Firstly and above all, exploring your direct location and surrounding areas would be the best place to begin. Finding funding and aid in and around your local home region will more likely make you successful than if you apply further away or even abroad. Local contacts, businesses, individuals and institutions should most typically be the first place you should turn to. It will be much easier to gain access to and the competition pool will be that much smaller. Therefore, in a certain sense, you will be stacking the odds in your favor, by taking the best advantage of what your local hometown and area has to offer you. It is always the best idea to begin close to where you live.

Most non-profit organizations and foundations have scholarships to hand out to their potential students. A few examples of scholarship sourcing might come from:

* Labor Unions

* Church

* Chamber of Commerce

* Other volunteer organizations

* Local chapters of professional societies

* Charity organizations

* School-based endowments to be used for scholarship funds

* Universities may have grants for extremely talented students of little means.

* Private scholarship programs

* Other sources of information on scholarships are libraries, newspapers and even the yellow pages.

* Government (federal, state and local)

The options and opportunities are plenty. It will be up to you to make the most of all of them, unearth the ones you think are most likely to qualify for or have interest in and then try to apply as fast as possible to all of them!
The United States government can also provide many ‘need-based’ financial aid packages and options. All these options for funding and awards come up mostly in the following shape:

* Federal Pell grants
* Federal SEOG Grants
* SSIG Grants
* Federal Work-Study initiatives
* Federal Stafford loans (in a subsidized and unsubsidized form)
* Federal Perkins Loans, and
* Federal Parent (PLUS) loans.

The US Department of Education, along with the formal body known as the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP) provides funding to most of these programs and initiatives. In order to quality for any of these options, a student must try to file the Free Application for Federal Student Aid known as FAFSA.

Take me to the next page of the guide: What are Scholarships? 3