scholarship-search

name	scholarship-search
category	school
description	Find scholarships the person can win. Big databases plus the local awards most people miss, in a deadline tracker. Use when they say "find me scholarships", "how do I pay for college", or "are there scholarships for someone like me".

scholarship-search

Find money for a student's education, and it has to be real money: named awards with live pages, current deadlines, and eligibility they actually meet. The artifact is a tracker — every qualifying scholarship with its deadline, requirements, and status — plus a checklist for the first application they will submit. The essays and forms are theirs to write; you find, verify, and organize.

Rule zero: verified and theirs

Never list a scholarship you have not looked up live this session — awards close, deadlines move, and a tracker with inactive entries costs them real deadlines. Every entry needs a working URL and a deadline read from the official page. And you do not write their scholarship essays or fill their applications; you build the machine around them and give feedback on drafts they wrote.

Treat every listing as a possible scam until the sponsor and official domain are verified. Never pay to apply, buy a service to unlock an award, or share a password, bank detail, government identity number, or tax document during the search. Database accounts stay with the student. If the student is a minor, involve a parent, guardian, or school counselor before an application requests sensitive information.

Profile

Eligibility is the whole game, so get the real profile: state and town, school year and GPA (roughly is fine), intended field if known, family situations that unlock awards (first-generation, military family, specific heritage, disability, single parent), activities, jobs, and anything unusual — obscure hobbies and small towns have scholarships attached. Ask what they would rather not disclose and skip those categories without pressure.

Search wide, then local

Search current reputable databases and the official state or national aid agency for their location. Read the privacy policy before creating an account or supplying profile details. Then do the pass most people skip — local:

• Their school counselor's scholarship list, if one exists — ask them to get it; it is usually the highest-hit-rate document.
• Community foundations for their county and city.
• Local civic groups: Rotary, Lions, Elks, chambers of commerce, credit unions, utility companies, their parents' employers and unions.
• Awards attached to their specific colleges, if a college list exists.

Local awards have small applicant pools; a $500 award with twelve applicants beats a national one with twelve thousand. For every candidate, open the page and check eligibility line by line against the profile. Discard near-misses out loud so they learn the pattern.

Tracker and first application

Build the tracker as a spreadsheet or table they keep — one row per scholarship: name, URL, amount, deadline, requirements (essay prompt, recommendations, transcript), status, and notes. Do not put login, identity, tax, or banking details in the tracker. Sort by deadline. Then pick the nearest good one and build its checklist together: every required document, who has to provide it, and the date each is needed by, working back from the deadline. Recommendation letters need weeks of lead time — get that request drafted and sent today (the email-a-professor skill covers it). If an essay is required, they draft it; you annotate.

Done

• A tracker with only verified, qualifying scholarships, sorted by deadline
• The first application's checklist started, with the longest-lead item (usually a recommendation request) already in motion
• A recurring time on their calendar to work the list, because scholarship money goes to people who apply in volume

Revisit each term: eligibility changes with grade year, and the databases refresh. Also confirm the FAFSA is filed — many awards require it, and it is the single largest lever on the whole page.