How Educators/Guidance Counsellors Can Use studentawards.com
1. Help Us Help You – let us help your students find financial assistance opportunities.
Encourage your students to register at www.studentawards.com. It’s free and it only takes 10 minutes! Our powerful search engine matches members with scholarships, bursaries, grants, fellowships, and cash prizes. Delivering customized lists of awards based on profile information that members provide when they register at our site! Our up to date, national and bilingual database contains over $70 million in available awards, including hard-to-find and institutional prizes. Only 54% of the scholarships in our database are merit-based.
If your students are already members, encourage them to update their profiles, because:
- We are always adding new awards to our database.
- As students’ situations change, they should update their profiles to reflect those changes, as they might match with awards they weren’t eligible for before.
Having your students calendarize regular return visits to www.studentawards.com can help them find lots of new opportunities to pay for school. We recommend that students update their profiles at least every six months.
2. Register Yourself
We strongly encourage you to register at the site. Not only will you experience what your students do, but you will also be better equipped to help your students find scholarships.
When you register, you will be asked who you are. Select “Educator”. However, carry on with the registration process as though you are student so that the scholarship matches you see are what a student would see. When a student comes to visit you, you can update your profile with items unique to that student, and you will see different scholarship and award matches for which that student is eligible.
3. Check Out Our “Educator Essentials”
The Educator Essentials section of our site includes resources specifically developed for educators and guidance counsellors.
Tools – This section contains materials created to help you with your job. Our Scholarships 101 presentation can be used at assemblies and parent nights. Additionally, we provide various templates, forms, and guidelines to help you save time on reference letter writing.
Articles – Read the materials posted here to prepare for questions you might receive from students and parents.
Handouts and Links – This section contains materials you can use to help your students and their parents. We offer handouts on everything from scholarships and references to post-secondary options (including gap years and apprenticeships). We also provide ready-to-use online banners and text links so that you can link to www.studentawards.com from your school’s website.
4. Sign Up for Our Educator Newsletter
Don’t miss a beat! This FREE monthly e-newsletter includes the following regular features:
- Award Deadline Alerts (for upcoming scholarships).
- Student offers, programs, and contests.
- Recent threads from our Student Discussion Forum.
- Featured articles and tips of interest to your students.
- Featured content of interest to you, the educator/guidance counsellor.
5. Visit Our Discussion Forum
Find out what students are talking about! The Studentawards Forum is a virtual community where students gather to share their knowledge, insights, issues, and ideas. There are hundreds of threads covering a wide spectrum of topics. Check out Money Management and Scholarships or High School Hang Out.
6. Visit The Stacks
The Stacks contains articles, tips, blog posts and videos designed to equip our student members for success before, during, and after their post-secondary education. Of particular interest to Educators and Guidance Counsellors:
- Discipline Action: Our collection of articles, tips, and videos prepared by top Canadian professors, broken down by discipline (from Accounting to Veterinary Medicine).
- Career Corner: Content written by consultants and professionals, and divided into stages (from Choosing a Career Path to Surviving in your Job).
- High School Help: Materials on choosing extracurriculars, preparing for college/university, choosing a school/major, taking a gap year, and more.
- Find Money For School: This is our specialty! From estimating costs and finding awards, to writing applications and getting references, we cover it all.
- Frosh Facts: Mostly member-generated content that covers student housing, classes/grades, exams, health and wellness, and general tips for surviving the first year in university/college.