I remember the spring semester of my senior year of high school. The scholarship awards banquets never seemed to end. I also remember my friend Andy saying to me after the last banquet, “Geez. They should have just called these all ‘The Cara Awards.’”

Yes, it’s true I was a good student, but that’s not what got my name called so many times. It was my determination.

I spent a lot of hours after school meeting with my counselor to find all of the scholarship opportunities offered by local businesses. I spent many hours in the evenings applying for these local opportunities. I fit it in between studying and filling out college applications. And not many other kids did. That made my competition a lot smaller, which in turn made my combined rewards a lot larger.

I didn’t win every local scholarship I applied for … but I did get about 80-90% of them. And all that extra work cut my potential college loans by half (if not more than half). My time invested into the local scholarship market was well worth it.

See, most high schoolers aim for the stars when it comes to scholarships. (Which isn’t an entirely bad thing.) You want the biggest scholarship out there, and so you pour all of your time and energy into applying for those.

Yes – it’s a great investment of your time. If you get the scholarship. But you know what? Investing time into small scholarships is well worth it, too! Even if they only sustain for 1 or 2 years, all of those added up can take a large chunk out of what you require for loans and make college much less expensive in the long run.

I actually ended up getting a pretty good academic scholarship to my first-choice school. But it was the smaller, local scholarships that made the biggest difference. By the time I was 5 years out of school, I already had my college loans paid off.

So, as you start applying for scholarship opportunities, leave no stone unturned. College is a huge and expensive investment. Every little bit of money you can get will help.

Learn more about scholarship opportunities.

Impeccable writing skills are the desire of most college-bound students. Even though practice makes perfect, the process of trial and error is a frustrating way to learn the rules of the English language. Awareness of the following common errors will help you pinpoint and correct your bad habits, as well as improve the quality of your writing.

1. Tenses. It is easy to slip from one tense to another when writing. Think about this during reviewing/revising, and make sure your tenses are consistent. Use past tense for essays regarding history and future tense for proposals. Use present tense is most essays; it evokes your active voice, which engages the reader.
2. Prepositions. Become familiar with common prepositions, and do not use them at the ends of sentences. It is fine to close with a preposition in conversation, but do not do so in writing. Rather than “This is what I’m most proud of,” you should write “I am most proud of this.”
3. Thesaurus use. It is tempting to spruce up a writing assignment with highfalutin words. If the thesaurus says it is interchangeable with your original word choice, it must be so, right? Wrong! Often a thesaurus will list related words that have similar, but not identical, meanings. If you don’t recognize a word, look it up in the dictionary to make sure it works before committing to its use.
4. Complete sentences. All sentences must include a subject and a predicate. The subject identifies your topic, and the predicate includes a verb expressing the action. Sentence fragments exclude either the subject or verb, thereby affecting the flow and understandability of your essay. Using single-word sentences for emphasis is okay in certain creative writing instances, but be frugal with them.
5. Commas. Learn the proper uses of commas. According to Lynne Truss’s best-seller Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, the following area few of the proper uses for commas.
   1. Use commas for listing,
   2. Use commas to set off interjections,
   3. Use commas before conjunctions to join compound sentences, and
   4. Use commas before direct quotes.

Learning when and where to place commas will help you avoid excessive comma usage.

For additional information, check out Woe is I by Patricia T. O’Conner or The Deluxe Transitive Vampire by Karen Elizabeth Gordon. These engaging and witty reads will help you master the finer points of punctuation and grammar.

Beyond entrance exams and admissions essays, every college student is expected
to occasionally wield the mighty pen for a paper of some fashion. No matter
what your major is, dreaded term papers and e-mails to professors and classmates
loom ahead. Writing skills can be the gateway to better grades and greater
academic achievement. Any author, from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. to Diane McKinney-Whetstone,
can polish his or her writing by practicing these seven easy tips:

1. Read, and read a lot. The more you read, the more
your parameters will expand. No matter what interests you - whether
it’s history, sci-fi or adventure - reading will subject
you to different writing styles, expanding your vocabulary and your familiarity
with grammar and punctuation. Don’t limit yourself to books -
magazines also are quick and informative reads.

2. Be yourself. Write what you know. You can write
more intelligently on familiar subjects. Sure, more research can be done,
but don’t start with a foreign topic. On a similar note: avoid
unfamiliar words. If you use fancy language that’s not “you,” it
shows. Big words do not equal intelligence. Be cautious when using your
thesaurus!

3. Practice, practice, practice! Go beyond writing
for school assignments. Write in a journal daily. Write short stories
or poetry. No matter what you write, as long as you are putting pen to
paper (or fingers to keys), it will only help you grow.

4. Create an outline. Outlines are extremely helpful
when writing because they will help you stay on topic. It’s
tempting to branch off into new information as you write, but you should
keep your reader in mind at all times -
you don’t want to
confuse them. Creating an outline will facilitate organization and cut
your writing time down dramatically.

5. Learn proper grammar. Grammar is often overlooked
these days. As you read more, you will become more familiar with grammatical
principles. Learn how to diagram a sentence. This will make you very
conscious of the different parts of speech and how they relate to each
other.

6. Revise your own work. You are your own worst critic,
which will show as you edit your work. Many students write without editing
or even rereading their papers. This can be a fatal error – spell/grammar
check WILL NOT catch everything. Guaranteed. Ask friends to read over
your work, too. Someone else’s revisions can help just as much,
if not more, than your own.

7. Review your past work. Take an hour every month
to go back through what you’ve done in the past. See what you did
and analyze how you might write it differently now. You’ll be able
to see your growth, and you can give yourself a pat on the back for a
job well done.