Scholarship Time, Baby!

We are a family of 5, living on a single income. We are lucky enough that Sam makes a decent amount of money for us to survive. In this economy, it allows us to have a roof over our heads, mostly organic and healthy foods on the table, and gas in the 3 cars. But that's only a fraction of the bills, as you well know. I was just listing off the top three. I feel like, just like a lot of other people, we are doing ok, but just one hypothetical crisis away from struggling to make ends meet.

Like a breast cancer diagnosis. 

But you know, when you fill out the FAFSA form, they don't see that. They just want to know how much you make, and then based off that, they put you in a box of needy, or not needy. 

Anthony is deemed not needy enough for any type of Federal assistance. So Scholarships it is. The rest we will figure out. 

For a while now we have been working diligently on scholarships. We've been working out of a scholarship book, as well as from a few online sites that help you match to different ones based off your information. There have been easy ones that can be done with your basic info and a few clicks, and ones that take answering questions and writing pieces based off of prompts. There are ones that take a basic biography of yourself and your college and job aspirations, and more in depth ones that have required proof of Sam's military service and various paperwork. It's been a lot of daily work for myself finding them for Anthony, and then us sitting down and getting them completed before the various deadlines. 

He's done so many online ones, and will continue to do whatever ones the scholarship sites say he matches with moving forward. However, our priority turned to the list of local ones the school finally released. 

Anthony qualified for 12 local scholarships out of the list of 29. Most of them require you to print out the required materials. Then you either mail your scholarship package in yourself, or bring your scholarship package to this one teacher at the school who would then get it to the appropriate place herself by the due date.

Knowing this system, we wasted no time reading all the scholarships to see what ones he qualified for, making a list of those ones in due-date order, then printing out his biography, resume, community service record, school activity record, student aid report, college acceptance letter, and 5 reference letters. 

We had a sticky note on the table for each one on our list. As we read through each one, Anthony got up and grabbed what he needed, then put it under the correct sticky note. We did this for all of then, making sure we had all of our papers organized. The ones that were complete at the end of that process because we had everything it wanted, great! We paperclipped everything and set it aside to either mail ourselves or for him to take to his teacher. When it came to having to write a special piece for a particular scholarship, we flagged that one and set it aside to do when he had the time. 

We are just a few away from being done with all the local ones he qualifies for. So that's exciting. We have no idea how many of his fellow senior classmates are going for the local scholarships as well, so we are unsure what his chances are. We are crossing our fingers that out of the 33 online ones we've done thus far, plus the 12 local ones, plus the 3 CWU ones he qualified for, that he'll get something. You would think so, wouldn't you? But damn are they competitive! So we will see. Wish him luck! 

With love,

Mama Hauck