Seniors can start looking and applying for scholarships to help pay for their post secondary education.
Scholarships are available for all students seeking a higher education after high school. Rather a student attends a trade school, community college or university there are scholarships available to help.
“The best place to start looking for us is gonna be the Canyon High website,” College, Career and Military Readiness advisor, Cenee Precure said. “If you look under the counseling tab there is a drop down menu that says financial aid and scholarships. If you scroll and look at all the information, there’s a lot of sites that you can subscribe to. There’s also a link on the website that is for local scholarships, which are the ones that are just for the Amarillo and Canyon area kids that you can apply for.”
The process to apply for scholarships can vary. Some scholarships require one or two essays while others just want your name.
“Sometimes you have to do several essays, two or three letters of recommendation, you have to usually turn in transcripts,” Precure said. “They want to see how you did through the first semester of your senior year. Some applications are very, very involved and require a lot while others don’t.”
The time it takes to hear back from scholarships is different for each scholarship.
“A lot of times it can take quite a long time and sometimes you never find out if you got the scholarship or not,” Precure siad. “Especially with the National Scholarships, they don’t say yes you got it or no you didn’t. That can be hard, especially if you’ve done a lot of work for them. Most of our local scholarships let most of our seniors know typically by the end of May, I would say from some colleges it could be deep into the summer before you find out if you actually received that scholarship or not.”
Figuring out the total cost of your post secondary education can be hard, there are a lot of factors to calculate.
“There’s usually a cost estimator on the College website,” Precure said. “Of course that’s not going to work for each student because it would depend on their scholarships. Once you get your Financial Aid package from FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid], then you should be able to estimate what your cost will be for the year. Then on top of that you can stack outside scholarships that you receive to eat and make it less.”
Precure shared a few tips she has for seniors preparing to further their education after high school.
“I promote students to get stuff done early because you get so busy your senior year that it gets to be overwhelming,” Precure said. “I think it’s always good to read the communication coming from the testing and CCMR center. I also suggest if you’re carrying a lot of schools, I think it’s helpful to start a spreadsheet of approaching deadlines such as housing deadlines and scholarship deadlines then just make yourself an alarm or something to remind you each week you’re checking your college portal so you know what documents are missing or what they’re needing.”
