What you should know about marketing scholarships

When you’re going through the process of applying to college, there are additional steps you can take besides applying to your top three schools. One of those things is applying for scholarships. The amount and wide variety of scholarships can be a bit daunting, but once you get into it, it becomes clear how beneficial applying for scholarships can be – especially for marketing students.

What are marketing scholarships?

College is expensive, that is a given. The good news is that people and organizations realize that paying for higher education is an issue and they want to help you solve it. If you feel weird about having other people pay for your college, stop now. It is more common than you think. In fact, only 11% of full-time college students pay full price for college. Financial aid can come in the form of money you have to pay back, like student loans and student employment, or in the form of money you do not have to pay back, like grants and scholarships that are awarded annually.

Grants usually look at your financial needs, while scholarships look at merit, such as your grade point average.

Merit, which our good friend Merriam Webster defines as behavior deserving of reward or esteem, can look like a lot of different things.

Merit can look like having good grades, being involved in extracurriculars, or something you’re able to create, such as your art portfolio, or submitting a musical audition.

Marketing scholarships fit into several of these categories. The stipulations behind scholarships can vary. They can be as broad as requiring a certain racial background, and as narrow as requiring you to go to a certain high school. Since scholarships can be specialized, you must do quite a bit of combing to find the ones that work for you. But before you put in all that work, it would be beneficial to understand why scholarships are important.

Why are marketing scholarships important?

When it comes right down to it, scholarships are free money, an appealing concept at all stages of life, but an especially appealing one when you are accruing as much debt as you do in college. College students graduate with an average of $30,000 in debt. Since having debt is kind of inevitable, people are occasionally under the impression that it’s no really a big deal to have it, however, you would be better off without it.

You might think that the job you get in marketing will be enough to pay off your debt, but despite how much money you end up making in your marketing career, debt can still follow you. Your debt is viewed when you are being considered for jobs, graduate school, owning a home, and a variety of other things. Not only that, debt has also been proven to have a negative impact on people’s psychology. Ninety-seven percent of people believe they would be happier without debt. Debt has been shown to hurt people’s optimism, self-esteem and sense of direction. Debt does not ruin your life, but it is certainly worthwhile to spend a bit of time trying to get less of it, which is what scholarships can do. The after effects of scholarships can be helpful, but something that is uniquely helpful for marketing students is the process itself.

How can marketing scholarships help you personally?

Marketing scholarships are applicable to your personal life for a variety of reasons. When applying for scholarships, you must present information to decision makers in an appealing way, and we are quite sure there is a word for that, wait, is it marketing? More so than a lot of other scholarship-major combinations, applying for marketing scholarships has a lot of alignment with what you’ll do with a marketing degree.

Some of the skills Concordia promises to provide in its marketing program are effective communication and understanding the purpose of marketing in an organization. One application in particular asks you to write about the five most influential digital marketing plans, as well as an essay about why you believe you deserve the scholarship. Applying for these scholarships can help you understand the field you will be entering and hone your marketing skills. Working through this process of applying for scholarships is occasionally time consuming, but it can prove to be invaluable for your skills in the future.

Things to consider about applying for scholarships

There are several important things to remember when applying for scholarships. Primarily, start early when looking for scholarships. You can start looking as a junior in high school so you can compile a list for your senior year. Even if some of the scholarships you are interested in do not open for a while, at least you will get time to schedule time to work on them. The second important thing is if you are not already, try to keep your grades up.

There are lots of different skills and extracurriculars you can capitalize on when applying for different scholarships, but a constant variable is having good grades. Many scholarships require you to have a minimum GPA of 3.0. There are scholarships where your grades are not as important, but it never hurts. The third thing is to just keep applying. It may seem tedious and occasionally fruitless, but the more scholarships you do, the easier it gets. And say you apply for 10 $500 scholarships and you only get five, that is still a significant dent in your debt. Applying for scholarships is a new thing, and trying new things is not always easy, but there’s a lot of good that can come from doing it.

Additional resources

You can find a list of the 50 best scholarships for marketing students, compiled by BestMarketingDegrees.com, that will help you get started. A website called Going Merry has compiled a top-10 list of scholarship websites that gives you some additional resources.

These websites usually require you to make a profile, and then can further specialize to show you scholarships that work for you. However, sometimes they do annoying things, like spam your email account, and divert you to other websites. The list in the second link provides an objective look at the pros and cons of each website, so you know what you’re getting in to.