Some of my fondest family memories from my high school years involve my mom, my dad and the camaraderie we shared when joining forces to pursue much-needed college scholarships.
I can still vividly remember that day during senior year when I discovered a scholarship application on the very afternoon it was due: While I madly scribbled down responses on the written application form, my parents warmed up the car and got driving directions for our last-minute deadline dash. We then raced across town to turn in the barely completed form—the three of us acting like recent graduates of the Dale Earnhardt Jr. School of Scholarship Deadline Driving.
And then there were those moments when my parents would stand by my side holding their breath, watching me pounce on a scholarship notification letter that had just arrived. More often than not, the letter would say “Congratulations” and my parents and I would slap high-fives, exchange hugs and then go out to celebrate.
We worked together. We cheered together. We consoled ourselves with Haagen-Dazs together. We were a team. And from this experience I learned that when kids and parents work together toward a common goal—college scholarships or something else—great things happen.
With strong support from my parents, during my senior year in high school I won two dozen college scholarships worth nearly $90,000. Here are seven ways that any parent can help.
1. Search for Scholarships
Parents can help leverage their children’s time by surfing scholarship database websites (check out ScholarshipCoach.com/databases for helpful links) and directly visiting school scholarship resource centers. Scholarship searching is an ongoing process and parental assistance provides students with more time to focus their energy on the critical job of crafting each new scholarship application.
2. Strategize the Application
Scholarship applications aren’t thrown together haphazardly. Because the best ones are strategically crafted, parents can help their kids work out a winning game plan for each application—one that showcases compelling credentials, character strengths and other important points.
Discuss with your kids the specific agenda and mission of each scholarship provider. Create a definition of each scholarship’s ideal applicant and help your kids emphasize aspects of their records consistent with this definition.
3. Provide Research Assistance
Writing a good scholarship essay often involves compiling background information. This is yet another way that parents can make a significant contribution.
The Washington Crossing Foundation scholarship program, for instance, asks applicants to write essays on government service derived from the leadership of George Washington in his famous crossing of the Delaware River. So my parents stopped by the local public library to check out some books for me about this time period in American history.
When I just didn’t have time to do this type of extra legwork, my parents’ assistance was a lifesaver.
4. Keep Things Organized
Managing stacks of paperwork and keeping track of scholarship deadlines can test a student’s organizational skills—especially when he or she has two papers, three tests and four scholarship applications all due the same week.
During these busy times, my parents would help me manage upcoming deadlines by calling up scholarship providers to request written applications, filing away the forms when they arrived in the mail and marking each one on a scholarship calendar that hung in my room.
5. Be a Good Sounding Board
When filling out scholarship applications, I sometimes caught “activity amnesia”—a nasty affliction that prevented me from thinking up appropriate activities or relevant credentials that matched the application question at hand.
Because parents have likely been present for many of their children’s activities, they may be able to recollect important experiences or brainstorm project details that would work great in particular essays.
6. Review the Writing
Parents who do a lot of writing as part of their jobs might make great scholarship application copyeditors and proofreaders. Aside from my own last-pass reading, my dad conducted the final proofreading for most of my submissions.
Parents can identify grammatical corrections, provide ideas for reorganization and offer content suggestions, but they shouldn’t insert their own sensibilities in place of their child’s—a big “no-no” that scholarship judges are quite adept at detecting.
7. Offer Encouragement
One of the most important things that any parent can do is to be supportive, regardless of the outcome of any particular scholarship application.
So help your child laugh off—with bowls of ice cream or otherwise—any scholarship rejection letters that arrive in the mail. Remind your child that apparent failures are merely steppingstones to success and that the most powerful phrase in any scholarship seeker’s vocabulary is “What’s next?” My parents were great in sharing my successes, but they were even stronger in vanquishing any sense of failure that I felt about those entries that didn’t make the grade. In retrospect, I now realize that this ability to shrug off disappointment and stay focused on what’s ahead is a great gift from my parents. Even to this day, it continues to impact my life in profound ways.
Ben Kaplan, known as "The Scholarship Coach," is one of the nation's leading experts on college scholarships, financial aid, student loans and educational savings topics.
© 2009 BY THE BEN KAPLAN CENTER FOR EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITY