When it comes to affording college or university, it’s no surprise that scholarships are one of the most sought-after sources of funding—but how can you, as a parent, help them find the time to locate scholarships and actually put together applications amidst their busy lives?
Help Them Look
It seems like you already have this one down. After all, you are on a scholarship website. That means you’re already off to a great start!
Set a Routine
Whether it’s every night, or once a week on Saturday afternoon, encourage them to block off a time where all they’re doing is working on applications. Help them clear their schedule, get chores done in advance, and most importantly, make them stick to it.
Before you know it, they’ll be applying to every scholarship they see like it’s second nature.
As much as finding high-quality scholarships and putting together compelling multi-part applications is a great thing, there’s still a ton of value to be found in applying to every smaller award you can find. But that takes time to do, which is why your role in this is so integral.
Review Their Applications for Them
If they’re lucky, they’ll find scholarships that don’t require essays or GPA to apply. But more often than not, a scholarship application can be a sizeable thing to put together and an even bigger thing to edit. An errant typo could be all that’s needed for a judge to disqualify them and move onto the next application.
Take a task off their plate and look it over for them to check for clarity and typos so they can move on to hunting for and applying to the next one.
Reach Out to Your Network
Whether it’s your friends, work colleagues, or neighbours—you never know who will have heard about a scholarship opportunity that wasn’t largely advertised. Maybe it’s at their company or maybe it’s from a local organization. This tip is something we tell students that often gets overlooked because it’s simply too time-consuming to reach out to everyone they know and ask for help.
But if you want to save them time and help out, this is a great way to do that.
Get Them Set Up for Next Year
One of the biggest hurdles with finding scholarships is balancing that with getting prepared for first year at a new school and potentially living away from home. From working a part-time job to putting together packing lists to setting up all their necessary accounts, there’s a lot that needs to be done before September. Good thing you can help.
You can help out with all of that, from creating a packing list all the way to opening the right bank account for them (really).
BMO’s Chequing Account Ft. Family Bundle Offer sets them up with an account that meets all their needs and, more importantly, saves them the precious time of doing it all themselves. Forget about all the banking forms, you can easily take care of this for them.
This way, they can spend their energy focused on applying to scholarships and not worried about basics like having the right account before school starts.
And to make it worth your time, if you complete the offer, you can actually earn up to $350*!
*Conditions apply. Visit bmo.com/350 for full details.