Who will you be tomorrow?

Going to college is expensive, and sometimes people don’t have the money to attend. Luckily, there is something called scholarships, which helps pay for a portion of tuition. But, how do students find the right scholarships, the ones that benefit them the most? Does it stress them out, having deadlines and requirements to meet in order to qualify for the scholarship?

Nathalia Burgoa is a sophomore and is planning on signing up for scholarships that are the best for her, and that will help pay for her college tuition.

“I’m not super into scholarships yet, but maybe, because I’m Hispanic, sometimes they give scholarships for Hispanic people, and my family doesn’t have a lot of income so that can also help,” Burgoa said.

While Burgoa isn’t stressed now, she thinks she will be next year, since most of the scholarships she has looked for only apply to juniors and seniors, she says she will be most stressed with qualifying for certain scholarships.

“They don’t all apply to me cause sometimes they say that you have to have some type of GPA, and sometimes, my GPA is good, but not that high and also they, like, want a certain ACT or SAT score and I feel like, right now, I haven’t taken the SAT test but I’m going to be super stressed about it because I want to have a super good grade,” Burgoa said.

Sophomore Pavan Agrawal has not looked for any scholarships yet but has searched up scholarships with engineering or technology backgrounds. He hasn’t found any major scholarships that are available for underclassmen. The ones he has found also have certain requirements.

“A lot of scholarships I find, require you to be either a junior or a senior and that’s a restriction for a lot of high school students. Also, a lot of scholarships have GPA requirements that may be hard to meet,” Agrawal said.

Agrawal also added that it’s the same for everyone to be able to get scholarships.

“Scholarships don’t know the person as an individual, and you are what you put on your application,” Agrawal said, “It ultimately depends on the application you fill out, rather than your background or history,”.

Agrawal said that there are certain scholarships he might be stressed about.

“I think some scholarships could be stressful to apply for that have lots of strict deadlines or strict requirements, and if I feel like that’s a good fit for me, then I definitely would be stressed at applying for it, reviewing my application and filling it out and checking over,” Agrawal said.

Junior Jimena Jimenez, isn’t stressed out at the thought of scholarships, but has signed up for a lot of them, some for a specific college and some for a specific career but, was stressed signing up for them.

“I was thinking about how I don’t know…how I’m not sure about what  I want to pursue yet. So that makes it difficult for me to know what scholarship to sign up for. At the same time, I don’t know what to put when they ask me ‘what majors do you want?” Jimenez said.

As a junior in high school, she has already applied for many scholarships in the hopes of being able to attend college in two years. She has to meet the criteria in order to apply or get the scholarship. The question is; “Is she stressed?

“Yes and no. Yes, because I feel like my GPA says a lot about me, but at the same time I feel like it doesn’t, because it doesn’t show all the hard work that I put and that sometimes, you know, it’s not enough hard work to get my GPA high enough,” Jimenez said.

She had started her scholarship search online, going on websites like CollegeXpress and RaiseMe. They soon started sending her emails and started contacting her and that helped her get more opportunities to find scholarships as well as the colleges that would offer her the scholarships to pay her tuition. Of course, it is not guaranteed that they will accept her for the scholarship.

“I feel like it’s a 50/50 chance that they will accept me, they can say yes, they can say no”, Jimenez said, “Sometimes a scholarship isn’t enough to cover for college, or it might not be the right scholarship for the career you choose to pursue,”.

A scholarship can help cover a small cost of tuition, or books, and can help you reach college to pursue your dreams. They can give students breathing room for when things get financially tough. Scholarships help students reach their goals, so what they dream of being tomorrow, will become a reality tomorrow.