Learn tips and tricks for applying to scholarships this semester from our CSF Treasurer Anthony Shirley!
Transcript
Hello! Good afternoon, this is Anthony Shirley from the University of Utah Center for Ethnic Student Affairs. I am the scholarship and financial aid resources coordinator. Today, I am bringing you the scholarship and financial aid workshop. So, hopefully we’ll cover everything that you need to know on how to get started once you apply to the University of Utah.
I’m going to be switching in and out from the PowerPoint to websites and back to the zoom screen, so just follow along and thank you for joining us.
So with that, we’ll go ahead and get started right off.
So where you can find my information and information on our scholarships is simply at diversity.utah.edu/scholarships. You will find my contact information there as well as a direct link to the FAFSA. There are a lot of scams out there in terms of FAFSA; you start filling it out and then in the end they start asking you for money. Always understand that the FAFSA application is free to all students, so be aware of that. That’s why we like to place it directly on our website. You can also find it on the Scholarship Office’s website as well.
We don’t administer all diversity scholarships here at the University of Utah, so I’m going to cover the ones that we do administer through our center. So with that, we’ll go ahead and get started, and we’re going to jump to the first screen.
So this is a diversity.edu/scholarships at the top there, you can readily see my contact information. That is me right there. During this time, we do have limited office hours and so email is one of the quickest ways to get a hold of me. So after today after this presentation, if you do need to get a hold of me definitely send me an email. And here you can see the financial aid FAFSA application, click on it and get started.
With the 2021/2022 academic school year beginning next fall, the FAFSA will require your tax information, and the tax information you’re going to be submitting for next academic year is your taxes from 2019, so keep that in mind.
I know it does get a little confusing on which taxes you’re supposed to submit information with, but it is for 2019.
The first scholarship that we administer in our center is the Utah Opportunity Scholarship. This is one of our bigger scholarships here. It is also eventually once you become a recipient you become part of the diversity scholars program in our center. It is a $8,000 award distributed into two different semesters, so it’s $4,000 per semester. You must display diversity in ethnicity but it’s also for first-generation college students, so definitely take a look at it, see if you meet the criteria, and definitely apply.
Eventually here in a moment, I will show you where you apply for most of our scholarships including the Utah Opportunity Scholarship.
Most scholarships at the University of Utah require you, once you are awarded, that you have a FAFSA on hand at the Scholarship Office, so make sure you fill out your FAFSA because without that FAFSA, it takes more time and it can delay your award. Because without that information, it’s very difficult to post your award if you do get awarded — and that’s just not for our scholarship, it is for every scholarship here at the University of Utah.
The Utah Opportunity Scholarship deadline is March 1st of next year.
And the next one we have is Chicana/o Scholarship Fund. The criteria are listed there; it is due February 26th of next year, so definitely read through all of that and definitely apply.
We also have other centers that are under the Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion office, so we like to share their connections to their scholarships/resources, so here is the LGBT Resource Center Scholarships. And it looks like their deadlines are February 14th. And Pastor Frances A. Davis Scholarship is also listed here. Contact us if you would like to apply for that one.
And the other scholarships we don’t administer that we like to send students to is the Dream Center. There’s the Academicworks system that I’m going to go over here in a few minutes. Again there’s the LGBT Resource Center scholarships and the Union scholarships. So that is our scholarship website, so access it. It’s just very simple diversity.utah.edu/scholarships, and there you can find me after today and after this presentation.
So you might be asking yourself, “okay, where do I look for scholarships?”
I always say the “C” plan is your best bet for beginning your search for any scholarship and every scholarship. I tell every student not to limit yourself with scholarships; apply for as many scholarships as you can. It is never a good idea to limit yourself. Perhaps a student applies for two scholarships, and they are perhaps relying on a Pell Grant. That is not a good idea, so apply for as many scholarships.
Allow the financial aid office to come back to you and let you know that you’re being over awarded, and that just usually means some of that funding will have to be returned to their resources, okay.
So right now as we go over our scholarships and in a minute here, we’re gonna take a look at the academic work system and our office.
We’re taking a look at the first three C’s, so “college, campus, and centers”. One of the first steps is, of course, admissions. Admissions is the one of the first steps of receiving some kind of merit-based scholarship or need-based scholarship, so be sure to submit your application for admission on time. February 1st is the deadline to be considered for many of these merit-based and need-based scholarships. That is not an additional application you have to fill out. All of that review is determined and if you do get awarded, that’s all determined with the application for admission that you submit, so definitely look to that. There are many centers all across campus that you can look to. We already mentioned the LGBT Resource Center, the Dream Center. There are other offices like the Women’s Resource Center. There are also scholarships or awards based on income and need, so with those there are certain programs such as TRIO where you can actually take perhaps a writing class or a math class if you are selected to be a part of their program.
There are various scholarships by centers as well, so make sure you look into that, and that’s what I’m also here for as well. You are more than welcome to request a meeting or send me questions by email, and I would be more than happy to set up either a Zoom meeting, or a phone call, or we can correspond by email.
Next we have here on the list are “church and community,” so if you are affiliated with an organization in your community, or if you are part of a religious organization, definitely look to them. Ask them about any scholarship opportunities that makes sense within those organizations. It never hurts to ask. If there are certain community organizations that you have volunteered for, or perhaps, are a part of, definitely ask about all of that, okay. It never hurts and you never know, you might be surprised that they have some kind of funding for students who are a part of their organizations.
Next is “career.” Career’s first step is parents. If your parents work for a specific company, perhaps, they have a tuition reimbursement for their children or student, or they have a half-off tuition program, or maybe a scholarship program. So definitely ask your parents about their company that they work for to see what kind of scholarship and financial aid assistance that exists within their company. As an example, here at the University of Utah if someone works for the University of Utah for over a year, their children can end up actually receiving half-off on their tuition, so just keep that in mind. Scholarships different organizations differ, so definitely look into that.
Career also means your own personal career. Perhaps you are already working and been with a certain company for quite some time and you can definitely approach them to see if there’s any form of scholarship there that exists. For some, they require full-time, others don’t. One great company a lot of our students access and utilize their scholarship program is UPS, so you can only be working half-time if you need to and utilize their scholarship. The career-based scholarships oftentimes — not all of them — require that you are obtaining a degree or working towards a degree that is related to the company, so perhaps maybe it’s a business-focused company, perhaps, maybe your major needs to be in business, okay? Perhaps it is a place of healthcare, or hospital, or a clinic, they may require that your degree that you’re working towards is within health care such as nursing.
The last “c” on my list is “companies.” This can take some time, take a lot of research. Some of the big name companies out there oftentimes provide some kind of scholarship, so anything you can think of just google it and do a little research. Oftentimes if they do have some kind of scholarship program, it’ll be listed on their website in either under the tab of education/scholarship, so it’s really on your part to really look for all of this. Ones that come to mind already are Tylenol, Nike. The companies like that — national companies like that — oftentimes provide some kind of scholarship. Do your work and put in some effort to finding company-based scholarships, okay?
I already went over the admissions process: February 1st. Make sure you get your application in on time. If it’s a minute late, 5 minutes late, a day late, you absolutely will not be considered for these merit-based and need-based scholarships that go along with your admissions application. Tell yourself every first, even maybe, days before February 1st to submit your application.
And then, you perhaps, you’re asking yourself, “okay, so I submit my application on February 1st. I’m being considered for these merit-based and need-based scholarships. What’s next?” So the next step really is Academicworks.
Academicworks is a system on campus that houses all university-based scholarships. These are scholarships that are from centers all across campus, departments, colleges, your major, perhaps have various different scholarships. They are all going to be posted on the Academicworks program.
I already mentioned the Utah Opportunity Scholarship and the Chicano Scholarship
Fund. The Dream Center, the LGBTQ Resource Center all of their scholarships are actually located on Academicworks, so let’s go ahead and take a look at that for a minute and see what that looks like.
So this is Academicworks. You can find it at utah.academicworks.com. This is a search engine, so in a minute here, I’m going to show you how to search for scholarships. The first step really is getting admitted and you’re going to receive your student ID. You need your student ID to access the system and start applying. So once you log in with your student ID, one of the tabs that’s going to show up is apply or application on. The screen here. Click on that. It’s going to ask you a series of questions and based on those questions the system is actually going to make some recommendations for you. It’s as easy as that.
So say you submit that application, and you’re going to click on “opportunities” or glide over “opportunities.” One of the options down here is going to be “recommendations.” Once you click on that, you’re going to see a list of scholarships that the system is recommending to you, to apply to, based on the questions you answered and what the system feels that you qualify for based on those answers. Okay, just as easy as that.
Once you ask go into those applications, you’ll see further more information on what is needed. Every scholarship is different, some of them require an essay personal statement and a set of questions to be answered perhaps. A resume sometimes is required and letters of recommendations. Those are things we’re actually gonna cover in this workshop here later on. The number of letters of recommendation can actually differ. Some require one, some of them require up to three, so keep that in mind as you apply. Once you click on the scholarships that have been recommended to you it’ll list all the criteria. Double check the criteria, and make absolutely sure that you qualify for the scholarship.
Every scholarship application also will have some kind of point person/contact person that you can directly talk to about that specific scholarship you are applying for. If you have any questions or doubts, or you need some clarification on things, it does not hurt to ask to find answers to those questions you have. That is what they are there for; they are there to guide you along, so that you successfully apply for these scholarships.
I always tell every student just because the system is recommending certain scholarships to you, do not limit yourself to just those ones that are being recommended. When you scroll down, you will see the list of scholarships that exist at the University of Utah, and this is where you will plug in key words. Here are ones that I oftentimes will access and look for. Writing is one of the more recent ones I searched for. That was from earlier this summer; a student came and she wasn’t an English major or a creative writing major, but she just said, “I like writing, and I’ve had some things published in high school.” So we entered writing, and believe it or not, three different scholarships actually popped up for her to apply for. She later on looked at them, saw if she qualified, and so those are the ones that are for writing.
I always tell students, do not limit yourself in this search engine. Anything you can think of, you can base it on gender, ethnicity, race, major, minor, as well as interests like writing and also talent. Perhaps there’s some band scholarships, dance scholarships, orchestra scholarships, that exist out there, so the sky’s the limit. There’s anything you can think of.
Also, the reason why I suggest to you “anything you can think of” and doing a search is there are some nursing scholarships that exist out there that entire application does not even mention nursing at all, so when you plug it in here that scholarship is not going to come up. Because of that, for a lot of my pre-med Health Science majors, I encourage them to plug in healthcare, health sciences, health on its own. And it can really expand your search for students who are in the health science majors, so any assistance with this I am here for that as well.
Once you start clicking and searching, and you’re looking at some of these scholarships — read again here — you’ll see the list of criteria of what the scholarship is, who the contact information is. You can see here, “Mandy Johnson.” Like I said earlier, she’s there to answer any questions you might have for these once you start accessing the system and you know that you qualify you will see a tab at the bottom down here once you’re logged in; you’ll see a tab here that says apply, and once you hit that it’ll submit the application on your behalf. That’s just the general information that you already submitted into the system, okay. In addition to that, it’s going to provide you with all the information in terms of if you need an essay, is it a one page, is it a word limit. Do you need to submit a resume, what type of resume? Beyond that is letters of recommendation. How many is required, right? So we’re going to cover that next here, so that is the Academicworks system.
Continuing on here.
Let’s take a look at some of these essays, resumes, and letters of recommendation. I just wanted to provide you with some quick suggestions, because I’ve been doing this work for so long, sat on various different committees. Later on in this presentation I’m also going to show you our office and all the academic advisors that work in our center. They have also sat on various different scholarship committees, so I want to share that information so that you can look to them in terms of either being a recommender if you know them and they know, your work. Once you become a student, that’s very advantageous for you so definitely let’s get started with these.
Essays, like I said earlier, can be in the form of a personal statement, and sometimes with those personal statements there can be questions tied to that. When you start going into these scholarships and begin applying and other times there are specific subjects that they would like you to speak on. Sometimes they can be specific to your major, and that can just mean “why are you going into this major, what are you going to do with your degree, what are you going to do beyond your bachelor’s degree?: So that is kind of your major-based scholarships.
Oftentimes with a lot of these essays also is speaking about your personal experience and part of those personal experiences some of these scholarships and committee members would like to know. What are some of the hurdles and what were some of the barriers that you had to go through, some of your personal struggles to get here. So in that statement or essay, they really want to get a better understanding of your talents and strengths that you personally utilize to get to the University of Utah. Once you begin your essay, always keep in mind this entire process this entire system is log-in/log-out; your essay, you will probably working on on a separate system and later on download even with that you’re logging in and out we get distracted we start working on it we could do something else when we come back.
So one of my suggestions is always “focus and flow.” When you get done, take a look at it, do a little proofreading and make sure that you are answering all the questions for your essay, the subject matters, as well as a personal statement. Revisit it, because you will be applying for multiple scholarships, make sure you are sitting down and doing the correct essay and that you are naming the right scholarship.
Some of the things that happen there are when you’ve submitted your application, the committee member begins to read the essay perhaps, they are reading for specific scholarship and once they begin reading and you say, “thank you for this opportunity for allowing me to apply for such-and-such scholarship,” and the committee member is like, “that is not our scholarship. That is not even the name of our scholarship.” Be very careful of that, so focus and proofread.
Definitely part of the proofreading is editing and making sure there’s a really nice flow with your essay. Sometimes when we take a look at the initial set of questions and subjects and our personal statement, we want to share so much we want to put everything — all our experiences — onto say, for example if it’s a one-page limit and we begin to just say so many things.
That’s part of the editing: what you want to keep, what you want to take out. But also definitely really get your information across your experiences, across the paper, and across to the committee members. Some of the best essays I’ve seen committee members read where they are just blown away, they were just baffled and they’re like, “wow. This is a really good essay, very strong essay. We got to award the student.” Then they take a look at the resume, take a look at the letters of recommendation, maybe perhaps look at your GPA, and they’re like, “wow, this is a student worthy of the scholarship.” You want to be one of those applicants, so just keep that in mind.
Part of the proofreading editing is grammar and spelling, so part of this means you proofreading but also rely on other individuals. If you have family members, or maybe perhaps siblings that are in college, parents, family members, people in your schools/organization if you know that they write well and are very successful definitely rely on them. Have them take a look at and take a lot of this editing and proofreading criticism to heart and definitely apply them, because a lot of these individuals have gone through this. They know what committee members like to see. The number one thing on a committee member’s mind is “who is this individual? Who are we awarding our scholarship to?” So in your essay, you want to answer all of those questions.
The last suggestion with an essay is be very mindful if there are page or word limit. Stick to the word limit. Stick to the page limit. I heard the committee members say, “we told them one page. Why are there two pages here? Why is there a page and a half?” That is very important, because to the committee members they are judging whether a student can follow just the simplest directions of a page limit.
Again here students get excited, right? We want to tell our entire story. There’s lots to say, but again here you got to edit and bring it down to that one page. Sometimes if there’s an interview involved with a scholarship process, there’s going to be opportunities to tell the rest of the story. So we might have other things we want to share but there might also be other opportunities to share those experiences, okay? So always keep that in mind.
Next is the resume. These are some of my suggestions. So as you apply, like I said, each scholarship has some kind of contact individual. Look to your counselors and teachers as well; these are just my personal suggestions that I have. They might offer more. Siblings who are already in college may have already applied for certain scholarships, and maybe you are now considering some of the ones that they perhaps applied for, they might have suggestions as well. These are just my own personal suggestions just based on the work that I have been doing here at the University of Utah. So a resume is going to include any employment history, so if you have worked any type of work, especially it’s certainly important if it does have something to do with your major.
Again, here you think utilizing nursing as an example, perhaps, maybe a student got certified as a CNA in high school and now they’re working part-time as a transition into the University of Utah from their high school. Those are definitely important things they want to get onto the resume, but any other job looks and reflects very well on you and displays some dedication/services that you offer and your talents that you have as well, okay.
Next is any type of volunteer work/community service. It’s on the list here, so if you have been volunteering in your school, within your community, definitely write everything down. Recollect everything, and get it on your resume. Sometimes we just forget. Once you get to the University of Utah, you’ll want to do a better job at remembering what organizations you are part of, where you volunteered, who you volunteered for, and when. Those are the most important things. That’s the information that these committee members are retrieving.
Next is if you have been part of a certain student organization. Maybe you took on leadership roles (leadership in terms of holding office — president, vice president, chairs, committee members), perhaps you went to a conference with this group of students or your teacher and you presented somewhere. Those are all valuable things that committee members like to see, because part of this question of “who is the student, who are we awarding” does go to that. “What kind of a leader is the student? How is a student giving back to the community?” Organization participation and leadership oftentimes are one thing.
Next is if you have any certifications,licensures, degrees. Some students do come in with an associate’s degree/certificates like I mentioned earlier — nursing CNA, phlebotomists. If you have any of those, definitely list those. Any awards and recognitions that you might have had or maybe you already received certain scholarships in your school, trophies for anything. If you’re an athlete, you can list some of those. Again, here at this point, your resume should really be only a page. No more than a page. Okay? Once you are finishing up your bachelor’s degree and either going out into the world to seek a job, or definitely we hope that you will be applying for a graduate program to earn your master’s degree or PhD at that point, usually a lot of students will have more than a page because they’ve done so much during your undergraduate years here at the University of Utah.
With all of this resume, the final recommendation is to keep it clean, to keep a legible. Here in a few minutes, I’m going to show you the website for the Career and Professional Development Center here on campus, but definitely utilize your high school counselors/teachers in terms of the resume. What should one look like?
You can also do sample resumes on Google. Do a search, take a look at them. It should be at a glance, retrieving information. It should be clean. Don’t let the committee members do the guesswork on when you’ve done something. Who you did it for and the rest of the questions that they might have in terms of your professional experience, and career, and volunteer work.
Next we have letters of recommendations. These are individuals to look to to speak on your behalf. If one of these scholarships you are applying for requires a one letter recommendation, two, or three. Be mindful of that. How this works is when you’re in the Academicworks system, it’s going to list that you need, say perhaps, two letters of recommendation.
You are going to enter the name and the email address of these individuals that you are considering. So before you hit submit on your application, you’ll need to do a little bit of a selection process for these individuals, because depending on the scholarship you are applying for you definitely want to select somebody to speak on your behalf on the subject matter or the personal statement or the questions at hand that the scholarship is really centered around.
Okay, so if the scholarships is around perhaps, maybe leadership and volunteer work, you definitely want to select somebody that knows you in that service. Perhaps it’s a major-based scholarship, so perhaps maybe in engineering, is there a teacher, or a counselor, or professor/individual within your major that perhaps knows your work in engineering. Those are individuals you want to definitely count on.
So teachers, counselors, and community leaders are also important to consider for your letters of recommendations. These individuals are going to talk about your attributes, your accomplishments, and your participation as you come into the University of Utah as a freshman, so these are things that you have done and have experience with in high school. At this point, those are teachers and counselors you want to count on. Be very selective, because you do have certain letters or recommenders that will just write a basic letter recommendation for you, and that does come across to the committee members that are reviewing your application. They can readily know it is just a basic, he’s-a-good-student-she-has-a-certain-GPA-type of letter recommendation or do they pinpoint certain leadership experiences, you have certain participations, and accomplishments that you have at their school. Definitely be very selective.
Also give these letters of recommendations some time. So making a formal request, some of the best letters of recommendation that come through are ones where students actually make an appointment or call them or send them an email and let their recommenders know, “hey, I’m applying for the scholarship. This is the scholarship. This is what the scholarship is about. This is I need to submit this and that these are the questions they want me to answer.” That gives your recommender an idea of what they would like to say on your behalf.
So again here if the scholarship is in regards to health sciences, perhaps this counselor that you already asked already knows that you are a CNA, that you are working in a clinic somewhere, and that you have done the certification courses at the high school. So a very well rounded application there when they are connecting the dots. Content is what I’m called talking about there and being selective about who you want to speak on your behalf.
Also timing is the last thing and one of my big suggestions. Do not ask a recommender one week before a deadline is due for the scholarship. Believe it or not, we do have some students who will come in and ask a couple days before a deadline. Rarely do we turn a student away, but it does not make for a great letter of recommendation when we have to scramble around and figure out what you are involved in,what you are doing. But again here, the more we know you, the better off you’re going to be, and we are readily able to say, “yes, I will write one for you.” But for your high school teachers, and counselors, community leaders, they might not have that much time. So oftentimes they have to be honest with you and turn students away because of timing so give them a heads up a month before — two months before — especially when you know that you have selected the scholarships that you are definitely going to be applying for, okay?
Here are just the last few suggestions that I have. One of the biggest questions and I think I brought it up earlier, one of the biggest questions a committee member is going to be asking themselves is, “who are we awarding, who is the student?” So somewhere in there, everything that they ask for, there’s a reason why. They ask for a personal statement or an essay, there’s a reason why. They’re asking and requesting a resume, there’s a reason why. They are asking for a letter recommendation — one, two, or three — because all of these documents that you are submitting in addition to the application opens a little bit of a window to your world, and who you are, and what you’ve been doing, and what you’ve been up to. For a lot of this, if you follow some of the suggestions I had for the essay, letter recommendation, and resume, it will make for a very well-rounded application, and that’s really what you want to aim for.
What that results in is connecting-the-dots, or what I like to call “connecting-the-dots,” and what that means is you are connecting these three different documents to one another. So as an example, maybe within your essay one of the questions is about your leadership and your leadership experience and they want you to talk about that. Perhaps you mentioned a certain student organization and the work you’ve done there and what the results were with by being a leader of that organization. Perhaps, maybe you mentioned a certain conference that you attended on behalf of that student organization, the committee member that will look at the resume and say, “oh, hey, there’s that conference that the student mentioned okay back in 2015, great…there’s the organization that went to Tampa, Florida for this organization, great. I got all the information.”
But then they look to the letters of recommendation. Perhaps the individual and the student organization advisor within your high school that you mentioned in your essay are the ones writing one of the letters of recommendation, you have connected three different dots in one place.
Other times you’re gonna be connecting only two dots; you’re referencing something from the essay and references back to a letter recommendation, or recommendation to the resume, so sometimes they can say, “okay, who’s this individual writing this letter recommendation on the students behalf.” They look to the resume and say, “oh, okay, it was a high school teacher…okay, science teacher…okay, great, that looks very well.” So connect the dots somehow, those make for some of the best scholarship applications here at the University of Utah.
I will mention “remain focused,” okay. Like I said, it’s a log-in-log-out system. Sometimes we forget which ones, which scholarships, were applying for. It is okay to duplicate an essay, say for example two completely different scholarships, but they’re asking for the same thing. Still go in and do a little bit of editing, change things up, reword things, include other things perhaps. Change it up just a little; it is okay to duplicate, but do some minor editing and make sure you change the name of the scholarship. One of the things you have to understand here is that all faculty and staff across this campus sit on various or are asked to sit on different scholarship committees all across campus, so one of the things that happens routinely is a committee member will get done reading an essay and they will sit there and be like, “hmm, this essay looks awfully familiar it just sounds so familiar.” So they’re baffled, maybe they go back to their office, and then when the committee members meet again and they say, “I found it this essay was the exact same essay that was submitted with this other scholarship.” That tends not to reflect very well, so again, you can duplicate, but do some editing, change things up, add other things, delete things. So that’s one of my recommendations to you if you are duplicating essays.
“Know what you are applying for” just goes back to the log-in-and-log-out system, and if you’re applying for various different scholarships, definitely that’s something you want to pay close attention to. The last thing is “proofread, proofread, proofread,” so again here sometimes when we are working on essays we are either tired, we’ve been doing a lot of editing, we’ve been sitting here typing, we have logged in, we’ve logged out, we’ve lost focus. Sometimes committee members will make those comments like, “why is this statement here? Why did they say this? The student started off very well and then it just didn’t go anywhere, right?” So those are some of the comments that I hear. Proofread, focus, and make sure there’s a flow.
Okay. So I mentioned our center and some of the advisors you can actually rely on, so I definitely want to go there. We also have mentors within our Center as well and some graduate assistants that work in our center. Those individuals you definitely want to rely on either in terms of doing a scholarship search finding resources that they may be familiar with, so say for example, I’d advise the American Indian students, so an American Indian student is wanting to find American Indian focused scholarships, definitely one can go to me. Perhaps another student might be looking for Pacific Islander scholarships, Di Kinikini in our office — who you will see in a moment here — might be the best individual to contact and ask about because not only do we work with specific ethnic and groups on campus we also do a lot of work off campus with the various different, for myself the American Indian community on campus and so I’m very familiar with various different American Indian scholarships, okay. A lot of students, like I said earlier, also rely on us individually. Current students rely heavily on us to write letters of recommendation on their behalf, so let’s go ahead and go there.
You will find us at diversity.utah.edu/centers/cesa is for the Center for Ethnic Student Affairs. So once you get here, the first thing you’ll see is a lot of our events start coming up that you can take part in as a current student. Some of them are for community members as well. If any of these are of interest to you, a lot of our programs are oftentimes listed here. You can also find our student organizations here, once you click on it again here are programs and events will be listed here and this is our team here.
We have the director Tricia, we have Paul, we have Di Kinikini, we have myself there, Giulia Soto, Martha Hernandez, and then of course we come down to the bottom we have Shauvana, Diana, Chelsea, and Julia, Kenny, and Wendy are some of the individuals that work with our center. And then we have our peer mentors we also heavily rely on, and they mentor a lot of our current students, so these are individuals you can look to for resources, looking for scholarships, and perhaps maybe asking for a letter recommendation once you are a student, so there you have it.
And that gets us to the end.
Definitely thank you very much for joining us, but before we go, let me quickly take you to the Career & Professional Development Center on campus, so this is a great resource in terms of getting started here at the University of Utah. Like I said, your experiences, your volunteer work, your community service, your academic work, involvement, leadership, please allow that to continue once you get here, because combined with this center they can work with you to structure on beginning, to the middle, to the end, because like I said you once you get done here and earn your degree you might want to apply for graduate school or directly apply for a job somewhere. And this is what this office does, and they have done a tremendous job in guiding our students in terms of mock interviews, looking for different national companies that are recruiting, as well as resumes.
So where I want to take you with this is you click on “undergraduate students,” you will scroll down here. It kind of shows you what you need to get started with the one I want to draw attention to is “making progress.” Once you click on that it’s going to take you here, and what I want to show you is the sample resumes.
Here is a place where you can actually go. A lot of these resumes are written specifically to majors, so some of the ones that are listed here are humanities, health, fine arts, architecture, education sciences.
Here’s one for architecture: Take a look at these — not to say that you’re going to follow some of these exactly. This is what you definitely want to look like, so again here, it’s the simplest thing as work, who was at, for when, was it for, and what are some of the things that you’ve done with that leadership. You can see up here is who was with, when it was, and what you were doing with that community service, so very important, very clean, very clear at-a-glance retrieving information. You can already see that all of these are one page, and again here that’s what you want to do from the get-go, okay.
They also do mock interviews if you set up an appointment. You can also, if you already have a resume, if you just want somebody to take a look at that. We are there for that as well to guide you along too if you need to make some changes. You can also send it directly to the Career and Professional Development Center to resumereviews@careers.utah.edu, and they will take a look at it. Sometimes they’ll make suggestions, sometimes they’ll refer somewhere else to say “take a look at this, this might be helpful,” they may do some editing for you, but other times I’ve seen students who will get an email back and say just, “looks great, good job.” So that might be you. Start putting a resume together and get some feedback from centers like this or your high school counselor or teacher or other advisors and community leaders.
Okay, thank you so much for joining me today. I’m going to stop sharing here. Again here, my name is Anthony Shirley. You can reach me at a.shirley@utah.edu. I hope to hear from you, or if you would like me to get you in contact with one of our other advisors that’s for some of those ethnic-based scholarships that exist here within the community I am here for that as well.
Definitely this video is available for you to view over and over, so get started right away. Definitely start submitting your FAFSA. You do not need to be admitted to a university for you to submit a FAFSA. Just get the code for the school that you’re applying to, and that can hopefully be processed and finished at the same time, which would be a good thing. What FAFSA also does is once information is sent to the university, it’s gonna generate a cost of attendance here within the Scholarship Office. With that information, some committee members rely on that. They want to know what you’ve been awarded, what you’re also getting, where are the limitations, how much do you still owe. That information for committee members will be like “wow, we need to award the students something they have nothing.” There’s also gonna be information on out-of-pocket perhaps, maybe your parents are not even helping you, but there’s gonna be a portion there where it does suggest parents contribution so we all know that in most cases parents don’t really assist us in paying for college, but all that information is very helpful. For some committee members, if that information is not there, they tend to lean to, “okay, the student has all the information. This one doesn’t. I can see that the student who does, has all the information, does have some great need, here the scholarship is gonna be very beneficial too. I’m going to go with the student who has already submitted the FAFSA, and I have all their information here.”
Okay, so that’s my last recommendation, thank you very much. I look forward to talking to you and meeting you, and good luck on your admissions and application process. Thank you.