You can learn about scholarships in several ways. Here are places to look for more information about additional scholarships options:
Contact your school's financial aid office!
Maryland Higher Education Commission and Central Scholarship (see below)
Foundations, religious or community organizations, ethnicity-based organizations, local businesses, or civic groups
Your employer or your parents’ employers
Organizations (including professional associations) related to your field of interest
Scholarship search databases (see below)
For more tips and best practices, click here.
Thurgood Marshall College Fund
Maryland Higher Education Commission
Central Scholarship
The Thurgood Marshall College Fund (TMCF) provides scholarships, career development, and leadership opportunities to students at HBCUs and PBIs, helping them achieve academic and professional success.
The Maryland Higher Education Commission (MHEC) provides a number of state grants, scholarships, and loan assistance repayment programs for eligible Maryland residents.
The Central Scholarship offers over 75 scholarships, interest-free loans, emergency funding, and seminars on how to pay for college to help Maryland students pursue undergraduate, graduate, professional, or career-training studies.
The U.S. Department of Labor provides a free scholarship search tool that allows you to search by award type, state of residence, level of study, and special categories such as race, disabilities, etc.
Scholarships.com divides scholarships by a variety of unique categories, including GPA, military affiliation, ethnicity, artistic ability, ACT or SAT score and residing state.
It’s easy to search and find different scholarships you may be eligible for and you can filter by your education level, award category, award amount and deadline. You can even toggle on the “no-essay” button to find scholarships that don’t require a written essay.
Cappex claims to be the biggest online scholarship database. Their filter system lets you sort awards by year in school, scholarship amount, gender, ethnicity and award deadline. You can also search for renewable scholarships, which offer college funding for multiple years.
You can filter awards by your interests, field of study, club affiliations or specific situations, like if your parents are divorced. College Board will also automatically match you with eligible scholarships based on the information in your profile. There is also an autofill function, which allows you to reuse information from other scholarship applications.
Going Merry lets students type in information once and apply for multiple scholarships at the same time. The site also prides itself on including local awards, which are less competitive and may be easier to win than big national scholarships.
ScholarshipOwl organizes scholarships by amount, types of requirements, number of winners and length of time until the application is due. ScholarshipOwl will automatically resubmit your application to recurring scholarships that don’t require anything beyond your basic information. This leaves you more time to focus on awards that require essays and recommendation letters.
Fastweb aggregates awards from both large and small directories. Fastweb will also notify you when a new scholarship matching your description is posted and when you have upcoming deadlines.
Each scholarship will have a Scholly score, which ranks how good of a fit it is for your background and experience. The higher the Scholly score, the stronger match you are with the scholarship’s requirements.