If you are a rising Senior with college aspirations, you’ll find no better summer job than a serious pursuit of college scholarships. Set aside 15-20 hours per week – about the same amount of time as a part-time job – to search and to apply for scholarships.

During the summer, you’ll have time to hone your scholarship essays into finely crafted appeals aimed specifically at each scholarship. You’ll have time to sort through the many possible scholarships to find those that will give you the best prospects for the most money.

Where will you find the scholarships? Countdown to College lists three pages of scholarship websites and search engines in the appendix, and the Countdown to College E-Forms CD includes them as live links. But if you only have time to use one search engine, try www.fastweb.com

When you make your initial visit to FastWeb, set aside an hour or so to complete its detailed profile questionnaire. FastWeb searches the Web for scholarships that match your profile, and collects them in a web page built just for you. You can set your FastWeb options to have the search engine email you when a scholarship deadline is approaching.

FastWeb found so many scholarship matches for my students, that they discarded anything under $5,000. And by using part-time job hours for scholarship search and application, my daughters earned about $500,000 each in scholarship offers. Not a bad return on time invested!