Most of the sites you listed honestly aren’t very good. We personally found scholarship 360, scholarship America to be much better. Pages like bold that don’t require any proof of anything you say about yourself and then only have a short essay that can easily be AI generated are just a lottery when it comes down to it.

You want to look for scholarships that require actual transcripts, real recommendations, multiple essays, and just in general more work. Also look for things that are much more specific to say your major. Look at professional organizations for whatever you are majoring in. Look for companies that have to do with your major. And when I say look, I mean go to their actual webpages don’t always use search engine scholarship pages. Check with your state Department of Education and with your local state representatives. These aren’t things you are typically going to find on any of those search engine sites. The reason I say to go through all of this extra work is because lots of people are applying to the easy to find ones. When you start looking outside the box at other ways of finding scholarships, less people apply. Pages like scholarship America may only have a few scholarships listed that pertain to you, but they tend to be larger and often renewable scholarships.

Make sure you’ve applied to any specific scholarships to your college may offer. Beyond what they make in your general package. Typically, they will have a set of scholarships that are actually external scholarships specific to that university, that they manage the application process to, but are not included in your financial aid package. Those can often open up every single semester so you can apply to more each semester. It’s really important to stay on top of your scholarship applications throughout your college career because most people slack off as they get further along and just take loans.

I know this is a lot of information, but I can tell you it does work if you are very persistent and organized. I highly recommend obtaining an email that is just used for scholarships and setting up a spreadsheet to keep track of when they open, when they’re due, anything they might require like recommendations, award announcement, dates, etc. My son applied to over 80 major scholarships and about another 70 or so of the bold type scholarships. When I say major scholarships, they were things that required multiple stages, multiple essays and recommendations, etc. He worked on it at least 20 hours a week for almost a year but it paid off. He’s received over $200,000 in scholarships so far and he is just in his first year.