Thoughts on scholarships, school, and starting up.

Here are a bunch of useful resources that we’ve gathered to help you apply successfully for scholarships. Here at AidScholar, not only are we motivated to helping you find scholarhips you are looking for, we are striving to help you achieve those scholarships. Applying for scholarhips requires a lot of organization and endurance, but with the right tools a scholarship applicant can be very successful. These free resources can be a vital tool for the scholarship applicant on the quest for scholarships galore.
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Here are ten tips to help you with your scholarship search.

1. Start early

There is never such a thing as “too early” when you are searching for scholarships. The sooner you begin your search, the better chance you have at finding what you are looking for. That means more time to apply and more of a chance you will obtain scholarships.

2. Be broad

Don’t give in to the tendency to be too specific. Open up your horizons and search for things that may be of interest to you, however general it may be. You may be surprised at how many applicable scholarships you may find.
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The driving principle behind development here at AidScholar has been Customer Development (and partially the lean startup idea from Eric Reis). Essentially, customer development is the idea that new startups know nothing. Everything is an unknown – your user, the user’s problems, and the right solution. The job of the startup is to measure and validate any ideas with potential customers before moving on and scaling up.

The initial problem

I’ve always felt that it’s a serious PITA to find scholarships online. The only two options are general web search (Google) and wizard-based matching services (Scholarships.com, FastWeb).

With general web search, most results are usually high ranking wizard-based matching sites or articles about scholarships. Usually you won’t find many individual scholarships in general web search.

On the other hand, wizard-based matching services return individual scholarships, but you never know if they are returning all scholarships available. All of these services force you to fill out a long questionnaire before returning scholarships, but what if you aren’t sure what category to pick? Should you select “journalist” as a future career to retrieve scholarships for literary students? Or will that only return scholarships for those majoring in journalism? So you are always second guessing your choices as you fill out the form. Am I getting the most comprehensive list or should I be entering some special term to get it? Going back to refill the form again to access more results gets to be tedious and can be very frustrating. It becomes a “luck of the draw” effort where a person can be crossing his or her fingers in the hopes that the terms entered will be the magic key to unlock the doors of the scholarship world. And we haven’t even address the fact that the terms are of a limited set.

So with that in mind, I figured to solve the problems associated with finding scholarships online, users wanted a fast and easy search engine tailored to return individual scholarships. A tool that a user can utilize with the confidence that the results are both specific and comprehensive.
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After several weeks of hard work, we’re pleased to announce the new redesign of AidScholar.

Highlights of this new release include:

• cleaner, faster interface
• sortable results
• improved details display
• share and bookmark features

Starter Guide

Many of you asked for more information on how to use AidScholar, so we’ve added some tips on the homepage and created a new overview page. On the overview page, you’ll be able to watch a short screencast on how to use AidScholar and browse through a tour of the site.

Sort by Deadline or Relevance

The most requested feature for the new release was a sort button, so we’ve added a sort by link at the top of every results page. Now you can sort by deadline or relevance.

Learning from feedback

All of our changes for this release came directly from all the user feedback we received. Thank you for sending in comments and feedback, we really appreciate it and we’re always interested in hearing back from you.

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What is AidScholar?

AidScholar helps you find the specific scholarships that fit your needs and qualifications. We aggregate and organize scholarships from different sources, to provide you with the most updated and applicable index of scholarships available to the public today. AidScholar uses unique tools to find scholarships from the World Wide Web and simultaneously indexes them to fit common search needs. When you search for scholarships on AidScholar, we give you the most relevant results immediately and allow you to easily customize your searches instantly.

Public Beta:

We are always working to make AidScholar the best scholarship search engine possible. Here’s a list of some of the features during our initial release:

• Scholarship crawler: We built a crawler that goes across the web looking for scholarships. We feel that this allows us to deliver you the most accurate and recent scholarships online, saving you the time and frustration of running individual online searches. You just go to AidScholar and look up your scholarship search and you can be sure you are getting a full listing of what is available.
• Instant refinement: No one wants to fill out long forms that don’t give you instant results; so we made it really easy for you to refine your scholarship lists. Just select a category and you get a refined list instantly as you click it.
• More info: Now it’s really easy to check out the scholarship website before you visit it. Clicking on the “more” link opens up a section that shows you a screenshot of the website, deadline dates, qualifications, and more.
• Keyword based searching: We believe that you know best when it comes to looking for scholarships. So instead of forcing you through a long form, you can now access over a million dollars in scholarships through simple keyword searching. You can change your search as often as you like and your list of scholarships will change instantly.

We’re working hard on the next release already. We’d love to hear back from you, so if you have any feedback, please contact us on Twitter: @aidscholar

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