By Rory Dulock | Staff Writer
The search for scholarships can be overwhelming, but with the Scholarship Universe tool, Baylor students have a one-stop shop to find scholarships tailored to them.
Lisa Martin, senior director for financial aid, said the tool was created in fall 2022, making it a fairly new resource. The online database takes the information that a student puts in a questionnaire and uses it to match them with opportunities.
“It was the outside scholarship search option, meaning that it will match students to external scholarships beyond Baylor,” Martin said. “That’s a segment of the tool that was really something that we were excited about when we originally decided to move forward with that as the scholarship platform.”
Martin said there has not been a scholarship resource like this before at Baylor.
“Students really needed an elevated mechanism to kind of search out scholarships, be made aware of scholarship opportunities, both internal as well as external,” Martin said. “It’s offering them a personalized experience and matching them to specific scholarships — both, again, outside of Baylor and internal to Baylor — and so that was really the purpose in which we were seeking out this tool.”
However, Martin said not all internal scholarships are currently available in Scholarship Universe.
“It’s just going to take a little time for us to get there, because there are a lot of moving parts to this process and implementation,” Martin said. “It’s a pretty large endeavor holistically. We’re really needing to make sure that we are really being intentional about getting everything in there accurately and understanding how the platform works best. … Then, working with partners across campus to make sure they know how to utilize the tool and can also help select students for their scholarships and notify us.”
Martin said the platform has metrics so the department can identify how many students are getting matched to scholarships, both externally and internally. It is also capable of identifying how many students are logging into the system and how many of them are applying for scholarships. Students can come back into the system afterward and tell the department which scholarships they have been awarded.
San Ramon, Calif., freshman Neha Chandru said the Scholarship Universe tool helped her find scholarships that apply to her.
“I used it over the summer, and I think it was pretty helpful because I could find a lot of different opportunities,” Chandru said. “I don’t really like writing essays, and there are definitely a lot of opportunities I found where you didn’t have to write an essay. There’s another type of submission. … One of them was like a video essay, so it was a little more interesting for me to do it that way, and I was able to express myself in the prompt even better that way.”
Chandru said the Scholarship Universe tool is a great resource for students because of the variety of options based on different student types.
“It’s pretty helpful for students because it sorts the scholarships based on what you’re interested in — whether that’s your career or any hobbies — and it gives you a list of scholarships that are specific to you, and it also has different amounts for each scholarship,” Chandru said. “So I feel like that’s pretty helpful, because if you just need a little bit of money, then there’s scholarships for that. And if you need a lot of money, there’s also scholarships that are specifically suited to that.”
Martin said the financial aid office’s main priority has been to spread awareness about Scholarship Universe. She said the No. 1 hurdle is trying to get students to recognize its value and to search for scholarships on the platform.
“We would love to have as a goal like 80% of our students win scholarships or have some scholarships come through Scholarship Universe at some point,” Martin said. “I mean, obviously we’re still very much in the early stages of the product, but our goal really is to help enhance and make scholarships a viable option for students to fund their Baylor education.”
