Originally Posted by
Hsu
Check with the financial aid and scholarship offices at the schools. See what their requirements are for various scholarships/fellowships and what you need to do to meet them, then work really hard to make sure your GPA and test scores allow you to be eligible.
Also, make sure you do your FASFA before you go to school (your senior year). You'll hear more about this as it comes up, but no matter what, make sure you do it.
As you get closer (senior year mostly) to going to college, check with your high school advisor about local scholarships and apply for them.
You can find lots of scholarships online, but be warned: As easy as it was for you to find it, everyone else had just an easy time - you have a huge applicant pool to compete with, so generally scholarships advertised online are not that likely to get you anything. Still, it doesn't hurt to apply.
If you can't get scholarships to pay for stuff, you'll have to look into student loans. Generally these are 10 year loans that are deferred until six months after you graduate. To keep the amount that you pay out of school down you can take care of the interest during school. You never want to have too much loan debt (from any kind of loan) but this can be a necessity to pay for college. Just don't think of student loans as a catch-all and excuse to not apply for scholarships; college is very expensive and sooner or later you'll have to pay them off.
There's not much reason to worry about scholarships, loans and federal aid until you're a senior, though, to be honest. The best you can do right now about them is to keep your grades high, take advanced and challenging classes, and make plans to take either the SAT, ACT or both.
You could also get a job and funnel the money into a savings account to help pay for some of your college, or also talk to your parents about them putting aside a certain amount of their paycheck into a fund to help pay (if they have the money to spare). Forward thinking about saving money never hurts.
