March brings springtime and scholarships. In this issue, we’ll show you the top 5 scholarship hunting tips to find great scholarships for college. Plus, we’re trying something new this month - you can watch this newsletter as a video news show on YouTube. If you enjoy it, please share it. - Christopher Penn, Editor

Still Need Money for This Semester?

The Act Education Loan is a flexible private student loan designed to help cover education costs beyond the reach of most federal financial aid packages. You can apply for it anytime during the school year and the money is sent directly to you.

Start your application today at:
http://www.studentloannetwork.com/winter/index2.php
or call a representative at 877-328-1565.

5 Scholarship Hunting Tips

If I had to tell you in a very short amount of time the five most effective things you could be doing to boost your scholarship search efforts, they’d be as follows:

1. Commit a day a week to find and apply for scholarships. One of the easiest ways to sabotage yourself is to not set up a routine or a schedule. You’ll put off your scholarship search until it’s too late. Instead, pick a day of the week, like every Sunday, and make a commitment that by sundown, you will have found three new scholarships to apply for and have filed applications for them.

2. Learn to harness the power of Google. As detailed in our free eBook, Scholarship Search Secrets, Google is probably the most powerful tool you can use to find scholarships. Search websites like Google require a little bit of learning in order to get the most out of them. But when you do, the value they can deliver is immeasurable. The more specific you can be in your scholarship searches, the better the results will be.

3. Search your own school’s website. Here’s a perfect example of using the power of Google to search a specific site. Head over to Google.com and type in this exact query: scholarship site:sunydutchess.edu

What we’ve told Google to do is show us any page on the SUNY Dutchess Community College website that has the word scholarship on it. This is a great way to find scholarships on your own college’s website that you may never have known otherwise.

4. Get personal and ask your financial aid office what other awards and resources are available. Financial aid offices are full of not only scholarship resources, but also financial aid administrators, some of whom have decades of experience in helping students pay for college.

Make sure to visit during off-peak hours and times of the year to get to know your financial aid staff; they may be able to point you towards additional resources.

5. Expect rejection and don’t take it personally. In a recent interview I did on the Financial Aid Podcast, I talked with Shayla Price, a woman who applied for 60 scholarships. She landed 15 of those 60 - but that was enough to earn her $130,000 in college funding and a free ride for four years. Had she given up after the first couple of rejection letters, she would never have managed to pay for college. Instead, she kept going and going, and the results speak for themselves. Keep going!

These are just a few hints and tips for finding scholarships - for more, please grab a copy of our Scholarship Search Secrets eBook, now in its fourth edition, completely free of charge at:

http://www.StudentScholarshipSearch.com/ebook

Blog Highlights from SLN Experts

• College Search Advisor shares some ground rules for comparing financial aid offers.
• Credit Card Guy shows you what to do as credit card companies get picky in 2008.
• Do Stafford student loans need to be paid back if a company goes out of business?
• Learn how to read your FAFSA results.
• Jon Rudy tells you why many federal student loan consolidation programs are on pause.
• Learn about how the credit crunch is affecting students.

Please take a moment to rate these blog posts and many more at Financial Aid News Stories (FANS)!
http://www.FinancialAidNews.com/fans/

Scholarships

Have you registered for Scholarship Points, our free college scholarship awards site? Scholarship Points gives away $1,000 monthly scholarships. Each point you earn gets you an additional entry into the drawing for the current month. Visit ScholarshipPoints.com for more details:

http://www.ScholarshipPoints.com

StudentScholarshipSearch.com (http://www.StudentScholarshipSearch.com) features over $9 billions of scholarships and grants for undergrad and graduate students. New listings are added everyday so make sure you visit often. Here are just a few newly added scholarships and grants:

• Totally Patriots Scholarship
• Ron Brown Scholarship
• The Superpower Scholarship
• University of Rochester MBA Scholarships
• Boston College Asian American Scholarship
• GFOA Minorities in Government Graduate Scholarship

Student Resources

SLN’s Resource Center is packed of useful tips, advice, and tools to help you reach your education goals. From student financial aid basics to scholarship search secrets, we have all the resources you need to help you finance your college education.

Visit the SLN Resource Center at:
http://www.studentloannetwork.com/resources/

Read blogs from our financial aid experts to stay on top of news and changes in the student finance world. Learn how these changes affect how you pay for college.

The Very Last Word
Financial Aid News is a publication of the Student Loan Network.
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