Complaint Blogs (Scholarships)

     Scholarship applications, we are assured they are everywhere then we are told that not only are they everywhere but that they are easy most of the time. Why do they repeat this information time and time again? Because they are convinced that we must apply to as many as possible, and that in order to get the point across it must be repeated beyond human measure.

     Scholarships are in not in anyway easy, however they are everywhere. Finding ones that you qualify more is just a quarter of the battle. First you have to find the scholarship! Yes, there are websites for these things. But the websites are not easy either, you have to fill out an entirely new profile for EVERY website, find a username that you will remember with one capital letter one lower case, some numbers but under any circumstances NO SYMBALS. Then you must store this information somewhere, preferably on a sheet of paper with the rest of your login for every other websites you’ve applied to.

     Now that you are on the website they send you emails with scholarships that you are “eligible” for, however when reading the fine print they could not be farther off on your eligibility. So then you spend fifteen minutes of your time looking through every scholarship the websites thinks you can apply to and eliminate about half.

     Next you click to apply for the scholarships, guess what?!? Another profile to create with a new username and password, because somehow the lower case, upper case and some numbers is not a secure enough password for this website. You end up writing your name thousands of times, and your address and email and birthday, over and over again. Then you finally get to the scholarship, this is what the last thirty minutes was spent for! The instructions for what one must do, drum roll….list five of your friends numbers so we can text them about the election. Seriously? Could it not have been stated in the brief description of the directions that you wanted personal cell phone numbers of people who need to share their personal cell phone number for my scholarship. But here is the kicker, you are simply entered for a drawing to win a scholarship.

     This mess is not easy, while there are tons of these “opportunities” out there they are not exactly ones that people are confortable with. What happened to writing an essay? Where did the simplicity go? Sure you fill out your personal information out billions of time but if you know the goal from the beginning then it is not a waste of time such as many of the online scholarships that are available now. College is supposed to be difficult, but getting to college? Should it really be such a challenge?