Scholarships - Going for Singles

(Forgive me. Spring is coming which means readers of this blog will be subject to baseball analogies as the weather gets warmer. Get ready to step up to the plate.)
Looking for scholarships is always a daunting task, and almost everyone I talk with spends a lot of time searching for “The Big One – the Home Run”, the $10,000 scholarship, the “free ride”, or other quick solutions to paying for college. Those scholarships do exist, but they are few and far between, and your chances of getting one are slim, to say the least. But what about the smaller scholarships? I hear people all the time bemoaning the fact, “Those scholarships that are only worth $200…they’re really not worth it to apply.” Well, that’s certainly one approach. But consider another.
If you were sitting in class one day and the teacher left a $20 bill on the ground saying it was yours to keep in exchange for some effort, what would you do? What if all you had to do was bend over to pick it up? Would you do that? How about if you could have that $20 for simply telling a joke? What if all you had to do was write down a joke? Would you do it? If writing down a joke seems simply enough, would you write down a short essay, say 2 paragraphs, instead?
The point is that most kids are willing to do a reasonable amount of work for a modest reward. Many scholarships are modest to small and usually don’t require that much effort to apply for. Don’t be fooled. They do require work. You need to research them, usually filling out an application and writing an essay. And then there is no guarantee you’ll get that modest scholarship. But think about it. If it takes you an hour to get a $200 scholarship, that beats the hourly rate you’re likely to get at any summer job.
It would be nice for me to tell you that it’s that easy for the $10,000 scholarships. But the thing is those big scholarships are more elusive. I honestly think you’ll have better luck finding –and getting—fifty scholarships worth $200 each than you will The Big One.
So by all means, take a couple of big swings. You might get that home run. But if it were me, I’d spend most of my time hitting singles.