Winning Scholarships: Tips & Advice

August 28, 2016

Here are a few tips and practical advice to keep in mind when applying for scholarships, which will help increase your chances of winning a few. I will also share my story to give you a concrete example. For a list of actual scholarships, I created a post listing several individual scholarships and scholarship programs called The Scholarship Big List.

Scholarship Tips

In general, scholarship organizations want to award students who they think is most-likely going to be successful in college and post-college, and that is generally exemplified by a student who not only has a passion for something, but has actually done things related to their passions. They also want to choose students who will most-likely impact their communities. The best way to convince them that you are a student who will be successful, a leader, and impactful in your essay response is share stories and accomplishments that are creative and unique, and stories that show that you take action when you are passionate about something.

Sometimes students say that they are passionate about an individual or multiple subjects, but don’t have much or anything to show for it. In order to write a good essay, you need … Read More

The Scholarship Big List

August 25, 2016

Given that I speak to high school students about careers and college every school year, I thought creating a list of individual scholarships and scholarship programs would be a great resource to help find ways to pay for college that is not often told to them by school administrators or hard are to find even on popular scholarship search websites. I wanted to share scholarship resources that I knew about when I was in high school, those that I didn’t know. I wrote another blog post called Winning Scholarships: Tips & Advice, which could help increase your chances of winning some of these scholarships.

Here is a news story done on a student named Kristina Ellis who earned $500,000 worth of scholarships, which helped her attend Vanderbilt University: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-i-earned–500-000-in-scholarships-212534881.html

Scholarship Books

  1. The Ultimate Scholarship Book 2017: Billions of Dollars in Scholarships, Grants and Prizes (Ultimate Scholarship Book: Billions of Dollars in Scholarships,)
  2. Kaplan Scholarships 2014 (Kaplan Test Prep)

 

Scholarship Search Sites

  1. Scholarships.com
  2. Fastweb.com
  3. Chegg.com
  4. MyScholly.com
  5. Cappex.com

 

Scholarship Programs

Minority Scholarship Programs

  1. United Negro College Fund (UNCF) – http://www.uncf.org/scholarships
  2. American Indian College Fund (AICF) – http://www.collegefund.org/students_and_alumni/content/scholarships
  3. Asian & Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund (APIASF) – http://apiasf.org/scholarships.html
  4. Thurgood Marshall
… Read More

Quickstart to Web Design

August 18, 2016

In this tutorial, you will learn the basics of web design. By the end, you will have built a very simple website. This tutorial will be simple, concise, and feature the minimal amount of code and terminology needed to build a website.

A website is composed up two basic technologies, frequently mistaken as programming language: HTML & CSS. HTML is known as a markup language meaning it does not involve logic, and is simply meant for formatting text and displaying digital media such as images, and video. CSS is known as a stylesheet language, which is used to describe the style and design of the content that HTML provides such as background color, font-size, size of images, color of text, etc.

Table of Contents

  1. Setup the Dev Environment
  2. Coding with HTML
  3. Styling with CSS
  4. Finishing HTML
  5. Finishing CSS
  6. References

1. Setup the Dev Environment

Before you start building a website, you will need two tools: a web browser to test with (preferably Chrome or Firefox) and a code editor. Download, install, and open either Chrome or Firefox and one of the text editors.

Code Editors (Mac):

  1. Sublime Text
  2. Atom
  3. Komodo Edit

Code Editors (Windows):

  1. Sublime Text
  2. NotePad++


2. Coding

… Read More

Git Started: A Quick Introduction to Git & Github

July 26, 2016

Github is the most popular version control web apps available where developers share open sourced code and collaborate on projects. It is an excellent resource to find examples for real world projects when learning a new technology, and also for picking up cool coding tricks and practices by looking at other people’s code. I call it the Google for developers. It’s a developer’s playground.

In this tutorial, I will show you the top 7 most common Git commands in 11 steps that will “git” you started. With these following commands, you’ll be able to upload projects to Github, manage different versions on your local machine, and collaborate with a small team:

  1. git init
  2. git add <file-name>
  3. git commit -m “<message>”

  4. git push origin <Branch Name>

                           

  1. git remote -v
  2. git remote add origin <Repo URL>
  3. git branch

Tools Needed

  1. Git
  2. Github Account
  3. Terminal / Command Line Prompt


NOTE: I also want to preface this tutorial by stating what I am writing this from the perspective of a Mac user. If you are using Windows command line be sure to adjust the terminal commands to suit Windows such … Read More