The number one place to search is the internet. There are many main sites to look at. Among the best are: www.fastweb.com and www.scholarship.com. They are the largest and best-developed scholarship search engines on the internet. Your next best source is your high school guidance counselor. Guidance counselors are tied into the community and can often direct you to community based scholarship opportunities. Your next source should be the financial aid staff at the colleges to which you are applying. Read the local newspaper, talk with parent's employers, speak with employers in your major field, and talk with students in the previous year's graduating class. Remember to explore your field of interest, possibilities offered by the state, your student affiliations, your hobbies and your ethnic background. These approaches will lead you to scholarship for which you can apply.

Students may believe the correct approach is to put the maximum effort into only one or two different scholarship applications. It is better to apply to as many different scholarships as possible. Remember that even the small scholarships of $100 or $500 will help pay for books. There is even a bigger benefit gained from the smaller scholarships in that receiving one improves your application for larger ones.

With the development of word processing and computer access, students should save all applications. You can often take previously submitted information, rethink it, improve it, and modify it to the specific criteria for new applications. The more that you refine your answers, the better they will become.

A frequent scholarship question involves Ayn Rand's book The Fountainhead. If you have to write a book report for English, why not do it on this book. If you have the opportunity to write any type of self-reflective essay in a class, approach it from the scholarship angle.