Easy money opportunities in exchange for essays are available to all students at Pierce College.
Like financial aid, scholarships are another way students can get money for school without paying it back.
Though Pierce may be economically limited compared to other colleges, they offer what is made available to them.
“The number of scholarships we get every year varies because we don’t have rich donors like USC,” said Anafe Robinson, Director of Financial Aid, Scholarships, Veterans, and Foster Youth Programs.
“Like this year we only have three,” she added.
Even though Pierce itself only offers three different scholarships, a slew of other outside resources can be found online by visiting www.piercecollege.edu and clicking the “Scholarship” tab.
“I think the best search engine is fastweb.com,” said Robinson.
Fastweb.com is just one of the numerous routes students can take to achieve scholarship success.
“We have different scholarships,” said Floriya Borzenkova, The Foundation’s Senior Program Director for Pierce College.
The Foundation is an organization that offers an array of outside scholarships from private sponsors, which all can be found on their website at www.piercecollegefoundation.org.
“For example, it’s a memorial scholarship that somebody died and the family wants to give scholarship and they have their own criteria but they ask [The] Foundation to select people for them,” said Borzenkova.
The Foundation application is online and only requires some personal information and a short paragraph explanation of why a student deserves to win the scholarship.
“I don’t know why students are not applying,” said Borzenkova.
Pierce students remain unaware and uninterested in free money, besides what comes from the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, even in these hard times.
“I didn’t even know we had [school-offered scholarships],” said Yonaira Kuh, an 18-year-old second semester student. “I get the FAFSA and Cal Grant. That covers all the fees and my books, so I can’t complain.”
Scholarships usually have a high G.P.A. requirement minimum but for the sub-par students there are plenty of them that target certain talents and interests.
Numerous celebrities have scholarship foundations where they award a student annually or every several years, like the West Coast rapper Ice Cube who awarded a student with a full ride to a music school back in 2009.
The David Letterman scholarship doesn’t even use grades as a criterion; the only requirement is that the student be a full-time telecommunications major with the intent to make a career out of it.
For the working students, some jobs offer scholarship opportunities to their employees, like Lowes and UPS. To find out if your job does just visit the website or contact your human resources manager.
The Career and Transfer Center is another alternative to finding out about scholarships. It is located on the first floor of the Student Services building.
