Continuing student scholarship application now available to those seeking assistance

By: Hanna Hake

February is a short but exciting month for the Financial Aid office at UNK. The continuing student scholarship application is open for current students who have completed credits at UNK.

“The continuing student scholarship application is now open through the month of February,” said Mary Sommers, the director of the Financial Aid office.  “We’re talking around 1.2 million dollars in scholarship assistance that will be given out to students.”

The scholarship money from these applications is primarily funded through private donations made to the University of Nebraska Foundation. It is sourced by donors from across the country who want to support UNK students.

Available on students’ MyBlue accounts, the continuing student scholarship is an online application that asks questions to find out about what students are involved in currently at UNK.

“It asks a number of questions of students that are things that we wouldn’t know about them,” Sommers said. “The application reflects things we already do know about (students), so we don’t ask them to tell us something about what their major is or what their GPA is, but what we do want to hear from students is some of the things we don’t know. Related to activities and involvement you know academic and co-curricular things they may be working on.”

The continuing student scholarship closes at midnight on Feb. 28, and because it takes some time to complete, Financial Aid is encouraging students to not wait until the last minute to open the application. If students have any questions or problems, they are asked to visit the Financial Aid office in the Memorial Student Affairs building.

Each year the office receives around 1100-1200 completed applications to be reviewed. They hope that by spreading the word all month long they can encourage even more students to apply. 

“There is a free text essay that students can write and where (students) can tell us their story, and selection committees do read those, and they take those very seriously,” Sommers said. “We encourage students to take a stab at it, even just to log-in, look at it, go through it, don’t complete anything and then take a little time to write their essay. If there’s an evening or a weekend where they’ve got an hour, I think if a student took a good hour just to work on it, they could do a really good application.”