So, you need some dough for college? Well, you've come to the right place. I'm currently trying to get enough bread together for my first semester at Berkeley. I've spent hours on the Web looking for money, and I've come up with some pretty useful resources.

I'd first start your search for free money by doing a bit of reading to give you an understanding of the stuff you'll be dealing with. And don't think about skipping this either. Reading up will save you a lot of time in the long run, and, more importantly, it will keep you from running down fruitless leads. ("Get me to the cash, Harry!", you're probably saying to yourself right now. Well, just be patient. The cash sources won't do you any good if you don't have an understanding of how they work.) Start by reading Don't Miss Out: The Ambitious Student's Guide to Finacial Aid. This book will give you an overview of the whole protocol for mooching from the government and other benevolent patrons of education. And it will also tell you how private source scholarships are not necessarily a lucrative prospect.

The traditional place to start looking for money is the entity that's most likely to pay you to go to school, the federal government. You'll start by filling out a FAFSA (Free Application for Federal Student Aid. If you haven't already filled one out, you might want to download the FAFSA application for quicker processing. But before filling out the FAFSA, you might want to check out Common [FAFSA] Application Errors.

If you live in California, as I do, and would like information on Cal Grants, go to the California Student Aid Commission Home Page. It's worth your time too: Cal Grants tend to be very large. They are need-based but limited; apply early!

Keep in mind that most of the aid you are likely to get will come from the government. If you feel that you have exceptional qualities that may qualify you for private source aid (e.g. GPA, ethnicity, missing body part), you will want to check with your school's Office of Financial Aid to find out what parts of your financial aid package will be reduced if you win an outside scholarship. If you are lucky, the school will reduce loans before reducing grants and other "free" money. But be sure to check: you don't want to go through the hassle of winning a thousand-dollar scholarship only to find that they will take that same amount away from your grants.

The best source of info I've found is books. Go to your local super-mega bookmart and look for titles such as Cash for College or many others that are available. Check each book out carefully. Some of them list the same scholarships again and again, and you'll end up wasting a lot of time. Others, such as the one I just mentioned, are more carefully organized so that you can sort through the thousands of scholarships for the ones you want very quickly.

And of course there are the many commercial services that offer to research all of this for you for a hefty some. If you want to get an idea of how many of these services there are and how much they cost, go to Financial Aid on the Web. Personally, I haven't paid more than fifteen bucks for these services--they are likely to draw up a lot of the same sources you found yourself in the library or bookstore, so I don't think you should pay fifty or a hundred shells for them. You might already be familiar with fastWEB, a free scholarship search service on the web. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should definitely do so; it's free and it will probably net you a good ten to fifteen sources of scholarships (or more if you're missing an eye or happen to be the fourth generation of an Italian lesbian immigrant who was born in the month of July during a lunar eclipse).

Next try CASHE (College Aid Sources in Higher Education). This is a very common search service available through a number of sources, but the cheapest I've found is Southwest Student Services. This link will get you to an on-line form that you must fill out in order to receive their questionaire. This is similar to fastWEB, but you will probably come up with more sources. It will set you back about ten clams.

The last source that I think is worthwhile is Chinook College Funding Service. They will charge you about fifteen dollars for a similar search, and you can fill out the questionaire on-line (though you will want to be careful about sending information about your checking account over the net, as they request, unless you encrypt it with PGP).

Throughout this whole process, you will probably have many questions. I would recommend reading as much as possible so that you get all the money you're "entitled" to (don't you love America!). One of the greatest sights on the web for learning all aspects of financial aid and finding many links (most of these links came directly and indirectly from this source) is FinAid: The Financial Aid Information Page. You just have to check this sight out for yourself. You will certainly find it very helpful. You might find the page more manageable if you first go to the Overview of Student Financial Aid.

Here are some other sources you might find useful:

EASI: Easy Access for Students and Institutions (general financial aid info). This is a government site.

Tools for Combating Scholarship Scams.

If you have questions that you just can't find the answer to, there is a staff of professional financial aid counsellors waiting to help you at Ask the Aid Advisor. But don't go there until you have exhausted all of your other resources. This is a great service, and you don't want to abuse it by asking questions that you could have easily answered yourself.

You've probably realized that my little page here is in no way intended to be comprehensive. It is, however, a link to what I've found to be the most helpful financial aid sights on the web. You certainly don't want to make the mistake of wasting hours and hours of browsing when you could be financing your education.

If you've found any of this stuff useful, or if you haven't, please let me know (it would make me feel good to know that I helped someone, or didn't). And if you find any other useful links, click on the link below and let me know so that I can add them.

Thanks for stopping by.

Harry Slaughter