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Video Transcript

Hello, everybody. I hope you’re having a good day so far. Today I’m gonna be talking about scholarships and how you yourself can create a more free education. So $17,550 dollars. That’s the amount of outside scholarships I got that’s not counting institutional or any government aid, this is purely outside. That’s quite a big chunk of money. For JU that’s about $45,000 tuition for room and board.

Okay so my name is Skyler Miller, as I said, I am a concert pianist at JU. I’m a freshman and I’ve been performing on the piano for over thirteen years and I’m also from the Sarasota, FL area. It’s a very artistic area so I was able to get a lot of music scholarships from there, but I also have some national scholarships and some that are just in Florida.

So the most important thing to finding any scholarship is Google. It’s really gonna help you get through this, you can just search in lots of different key terms and it’ll help you find the exact scholarships that you want. Some of these for me, I would use Jacksonville piano scholarships, Jacksonville music scholarships, or just scholarships in general. You can really fine tune it to whatever you’re looking for or just broaden that and make it a more expanded scholarship.

There’s lots of places you can look for these scholarships. You can look at the Jacksonville University website, there’s a lot of scholarships on there, including other university websites. I did that for all the places that I was applying to. They have a large list of different scholarships, ranging from majors for national or just for certain areas. Then also big companies like Walmart, McDonald’s, Burger King, most likely have a scholarship program and they give out a lot of money.

You really need to stay organized when you’re doing this because if you lose track, it kind of just goes downhill. So it’s really important to have what I did is I had a scholarship folder where I had on one side a completed section and then an incomplete section. For each of those scholarships, I would write out all of the things that I needed to do and cross them off one by one. That way before I sent out all of the scholarships, I had a checklist before I sent out all the scholarships to make sure that I had everything that I needed.

So one of the most important parts of a scholarship application is the scholarship essays. It most likely going to be why do you believe you’re worthy of receiving the scholarship and what are your plans for the future. This is just kind of a sample essay if you’d like to read through it. The most important part of the essay is truly selling yourself in as few words as possible because they have lots of scholarship applications that these people read through. You want to make sure that you are putting your best foot forward and you are telling them why you deserve this, because that’s the most important part if you focus on your honors, your GPA, anything substantial, you should be able to talk about that and show them that you’re worthy of it.

So it’s a little blurry but this is what I used to organize all of my scholarships. It’s an Excel spreadsheet. Right here you have the scholarship name, right here is the due date that it would have been sent out that was making sure that I had them out at the right time, and these are the dates that I sent the actual scholarship out to make sure that I didn’t send a double or anything over. Over here I put down the award amount if it was known at the time. Then the ones that are highlighted in green are the ones that I did receive. I applied for 37 scholarships last year, my senior year, and out of all those, I believe I got 12 or 13. It’s about a 33%, I guess acceptance rate, so if you, yourself, just apply to like 4 scholarships, you have a good GPA, strong essays, you’re more than likely to get at least 1 of them. Any bit really counts in this.

The best part about some of these scholarships are that you can apply the first year as a Senior in high school and then you can continue to apply for them every year after that. These are just a few of them that I do. Not all of them are going to be renewable or be available to you again but a lot of them still are and you can always search for more.

So this is a list of all of the outside scholarships that I received. A lot of them as you can tell are art scholarships but I have some like that’s a bank, a lot of Community Foundation’s really help support the community with scholarships. If you ever feel worried that you may not qualify for a scholarship just go ahead and submit the application anyway because if no one happens to apply for that you can still get it. The Pi Beta Beta Foundation, I technically wasn’t supposed to apply for it but because they had no recipients they chose me because I had no one else to go for it.

So here’s my financial aid. From government aid I got $10,971 and then from the outside as I already stated is the $17,550 and adding that it’s about almost $30,000. The total cost of attendance here at JU is $45, 790. So as you can see there’s just a little bit more to cover and most likely the institutional scholarships can help merge that in between section.