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 Scholarship SuccessThe professional benefits of continuing your nursing education are numerous. Less numerous may be your options for coming up with the dollars to pay for it. By Judith Earley The professional benefits of continuing your nursing education are numerous. Less numerous may be your options for coming up with the dollars to pay for it. Securing a low-interest student loan is an obvious solution. The U.S. Department of Education is the single largest provider of student financial aid through federally sponsored loan programs.
However, if you want something that you don’t have to pay back, a scholarship may be just the thing to finance your education. Colleges and universities are the largest—but not the only—source of academic scholarships. And while some awards are based solely on financial need, others are determined largely by a student’s application, so it pays—literally—to follow some guidelines on preparing and submitting your request for assistance. Take Your TimeEvangelical Community Hospital in Lewisburg, Pa., offers its Mae F. Keefer Nursing Scholarships to encourage high school students in the state’s Snyder, Union and Northumberland counties to pursue a professional nursing career. The precise criteria for the awards demonstrates how thorough the selection committee is in choosing recipients. Beth Strausser, administrative secretary at the hospital, explains, “Students applying for one of our scholarships are rated on a scale of zero to five, on the basis of nine specific criteria: academic standing, financial need, quality of references, acceptance at a school of nursing, career goals, quality of essay, community service and/or extracurricular activities, complete application, and previous exposure to health care.” She notes that a personal interview is no longer required because of the logistics required in pulling both the scholarship committee and the applicants together at one time. Given such a comprehensive selection process, students must give equal attention to detail in applying for a scholarship. To start the process, contact the financial aid department of your nursing school and find out what it has to offer. Then give yourself plenty of time, and follow your school’s guidelines to the letter, advises Beth Richardson, dean of student affairs at Indiana University. “Students tend to start the application process too late. They need to start at least six to 12 months ahead of time before the applications are due. And applications are usually due sometime in the fall or spring,” says Richardson. Students need time to get themselves organized, and if the application calls for some kind of an essay, additional time should be set aside to write and review the essay. Be sure to have other people read and critique your essay so you can be confident that you have done it well. The University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Nursing offers both undergraduate and graduate scholarships. Carol Rosga works in the Office of the Assistant Dean for Student Services there and stresses that students also need to read the instructions carefully. “For our scholarships you have to have at least a 3.0 grade point average. It says it right on the first page of the application,” says Rosga. “Once in a while we get some applicants who don’t read that part. These are just discarded, because they are not eligible. Applicants have to read that first page of the application.” Susan Wong, staff specialist at the Foundation of the National Student Nurses Association, recommends that applicants be neat and thorough. “They don’t complete the application in its entirety,” she says when asked about students’ most common mistakes. “They leave something out.” Sloppy applications are a surprisingly widespread problem. Richardson says that students need to type or complete their applications on a computer. “Everybody thinks that their handwriting is legible but it’s not,” she notes. “The point is to fill out your application so that people can read it.” Digging for Gold
Says Richardson, “Students need to be very organized about their search. They need to ask local businesses, banks, churches and other such places because lots of times they will have small scholarships. Those are good places to begin a search process.” Officials note that students tend to go after the scholarships that offer the large lump sums of money, and ignore these much smaller ones. Combining several smaller scholarships into an amount that equals one large award works equally well at financing an education, however. An added appeal: Often, other students don’t know about the smaller awards, so those who do apply have a better chance of success. “There’s not as much competition,” says Richardson. She notes that Indiana University’s nursing program administers an annual scholarship that is sponsored by a local historical society, and another one which is funded by a veteran’s group. Once you’ve identified specific scholarships for which you are eligible, contact the sponsoring organization for an application and ask about the deadline for consideration, as well as the method by which students will be informed whether or not they have received the scholarship. When you receive the application, confirm that it relates to the scholarship for which you want to apply, because many organizations offer several different awards. Then, be sure to answer each question thoroughly. Don’t leave any blanks. “Sometimes students don’t know what their GPA really is, or they apply for the wrong scholarship,” says Rosga. Judith Earley is a free-lance writer based in Orange County, Calif. |
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Experts agree that students should never pay for information listing
available scholarships, because you can get all you need for free. To
find scholarships that are sponsored by organiza-tions other than their
school, students can use scholarship search databases to find potential
sources of money. (See 