How your kids can get a scholarship

Of the $70 million available in scholarships each year in Canada, about $7 million goes unclaimed because students don’t realize so many scholarships exist. Here’s how to help your child access those dollars.

Register online
Scholarship websites such as www.studentawards.com and www.scholarshipscanada.com catalogue thousands of awards in their databases. When students register on the sites and create a profile (which includes their academic marks, field of study, schools to which they want to apply, hobbies, artistic pursuits, community service, etc.), the sites match the individuals with scholarships, bursaries and awards for which they are eligible.

ScholarshipsCanada.com doesn't ask for an address or phone number. Studentawards.com requests a parent's address for scholarship-matching purposes.

Once the applicant is registered, Studentawards.com sends the matches to a student's inbox on the site; at ScholarshipsCanada.com, the profile is used to select appropriate matches when the student searches for scholarships. "It's convenient because everything is one place, and I did see a couple of [scholarships] that I'd never heard of," says Edward Choi, 18, who attends Sir Winston Churchill High School in Calgary and has been using Studentawards.com, which will even send out reminders of scholarship deadlines. ScholarshipsCanada.com plans to have an alert system in place in six months.
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Some scholarships are based on academic performance and/or financial need. Twenty-one-year-old Alysha Sears, a fourth-year neuroscience honours student at Dalhousie University in Halifax who has used ScholarshipsCanada.com, had high school marks in the 90s. She was awarded a $1,500 Oriole Scholarship for her first year, largely based on her marks and financial need.

Find the best scholarship for you
You might be thinking your son is no academic genius, but there are other types of scholarships that might better suit him. "It's important to be well rounded," says Lauren Wallace, 19, a first-year arts and sciences student at University of Guelph in Ontario, who landed seven scholarships (four of which she found on Studentawards.com), including a $16,000 Millennium Excellence Award. Lauren earned the Millennium Award and other scholarships in part because she helped to found a food and clothing bank for other students at her school, went to Kenya in the summer to help build schools through Free the Children and was president of the student council in Grade 11.

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