Applying for scholarships is hard. Winning scholarships is harder. But if you apply to the right scholarships, your odds automatically get better. That’s why Christopher Gray created Scholly while he was a senior at Drexel. That year, he appeared on Shark Tank looking for investors, and caused the biggest fight the show’s seen.
The founder and CEO grew up in an underserved Alabama community — where gangs, violence, and drugs in the school system made it difficult for motivated students to excel. "That coupled with a lack of economic opportunity made it even harder to succeed no matter how hard I worked," he tells Teen Vogue. And he worked hard — when it came time to think about paying for college, Christopher spent months scrutinizing websites like Fast Web* and Scholarships.com to find funding. Because his internet access was limited — both his high school and the local library placed time limits on computer usage — he would hand-write essays and type them on his phone. But by the time he graduated, Christopher had accumulated $1.3 million in scholarships, including some of the nation’s most prestigious awards: the Coca-Cola Scholarship and the Gates Millennium Scholarship. Although his work paid off, he found the scholarship application process to be arduous and inefficient.
“It would take you about 20 minutes to put in all of your personal information and then the sites would bring up hundreds of ‘matches’ that you had to sort through in order to see if you actually qualified for them,” Christopher explains. “I knew there had to be an easier way to match students with scholarships they qualify for.”
Scholly uses an eight-parameter system to filter the database of scholarships Christopher created. Those eight parameters are the eight most common eligibility requirements for scholarships – gender, location, career aspiration, ethnicity, etc. When you sign up, you answer those eight questions, and Scholly gives you a list of scholarship options. You also get a nifty calendar where you can track those scholarships’ deadlines, and a space to save all the essays you write (so you can doctor them up for each individual application). A personalized scholarship database? Sounds like a winner to us.
Christopher also shared these tips for applying:
Start early — High school students should start searching for scholarships during their junior year of high school to create a cumulative list of the scholarships they are eligible for. Then senior year can be devoted to the actual process of applying for the scholarships.
Recycle your essays — A good number of scholarship essay questions are very similar to one another. It is smart to write a few essays and then find scholarships with similar essay prompts. This allows students to apply for more scholarships with maximum efficiency.
Apply for smaller scholarships — Smaller, less well-known scholarships tend to receive fewer applicants because students think they won't make an impact in the overall cost of college. However, if you win ten $1,000 scholarships, you'd probably agree that it's worth it. It might require you to apply for a larger number of scholarships, but in the end you are increasing your chances of getting selected.
Think about what makes you unique — Apply for scholarships that have a very specific requirement such as being vegetarian, LGBT, or left-handed. Since some scholarships are super specific, they tend to be less competitive.
