Searching For Scholarships – Weekly Hours. Yes! You most certainly should set up scholarship search hours each week. Otherwise you will simply “not do it!” It’s just too tempting for most students to put these kinds of things off…but relax…you can still make an occasional exception. Here’s what happens. Wanna go to a movie with a friend or go to the game with the girls and guys tonight? You’ll have to learn to say “no, not this time” more often than you’d ever like to do. Isn’t it true that we always would rather do the fun thing than the hard thing? Isn’t that pretty much what we call, “human?” Of course. So relax, knowing that this is normal. At the same time, this is the part of self-discipline that we have to learn to overcome more and more often as we get older… Some call it maturity since it seems to come with age. It also comes with life that enforces it in certain circumstances (e.g., job, marriage, etc). And other times, it is quite appropriate to do a family or social thing not previously scheduled. You don’t want be overly rigid on this!
About wanting to do the “fun thing”…We naturally want to please our emotional center that is ALWAYS crying out for more attention. Well, okay… ALMOST always. It seems our emotions want to “unfairly and disproportionately” drive a huge number of our decisions. Our intellect knows better, but the emotions just don’t seem to want to be silenced. They have a way of constantly coming at us again and again with another reason why we should fulfill the “desires of the heart.” It’s hard to manage this and this ingredient is actually a critical key to getting into the best colleges and doing the required work to win scholarships and grants as well as implementing other debt avoidance strategies. The problem is that the emotional side of us simply does not want to consider the long term effects of “a simple evening out with my friends.” In fact, it’s as though my emotions don’t even acknowledge the existence of a long term impact of a decision that pleases my internal emotional center. That’s where the intellect has to come to your rescue. You can still have a decent social life, but your emotions will still object. It’s just that you’ll have to learn how to restrict the emotional side more often than most people—knowing that the long term benefits of such internal control are ENORMOUS in terms of your future life in virtually every area—and not just related to colleges and scholarships. And the more you know and believe this, the quieter your emotions will become. Many young people don’t “get this” yet unless they have been paying very careful attention to their own lives and the lives of others, and connecting the dots. Usually such thinking is strengthened in those over eighteen and maybe gets much stronger by the time a person reaches 25 years or so. (True. Some don’t learn this until age 30 or 40. And some seem to never learn this at any age!).
The problem with regard to scholarships and grants is that you are now competing with others under eighteen. So, if you can get more control in this emotional-social area, you will be putting yourself in a much stronger position to win the competition against those who have not learned this level of self-discipline. And you will be able to compete with other scholarship searchers who HAVE their emotional side under control.
Here’s a method that works for some. Just tell your friends that you’ll get to the gathering a little later with, “I can’t get there until 8:30 or 9:00 (or even later).” That way you make more progress on your search project—and you can look at the gathering as a kind of reward for doing the work. Also, when you arrive, you’ll have plenty of socializing, plus you’ll feel great that you made more progress. Once again, the scholarship search problem goes back to the fact that it is not a simple task to find the right scholarship. It takes time and you’ll have to put the hours in.