Tag Archives: Mobile Apps

Sail Mobile App for Scholarship Hunters on the Go

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Sail Mobile AppSail Simple Scholarship Search

Available at the iTunes App Store

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sail-simple-scholarship-search/id785376680?mt=8

Sail is a new smartphone scholarship app. The creators of Sail state as their mission: To get students to go to school for free by providing an easy way for them to find and win scholarships. There’s not much else to discover about the background of Sail, except that the Sail team consists of “a couple of college grads,” one of whom (listed as the developer) is Calvin Cox.

Start searching for scholarships by entering your student information: gender, race, location, school, education, major, GPA, and other, and then hit Find Scholarships. The resulting scholarship list gives you a way to sign up for email updates, below which are two sections for scholarship listings—by specific school (chosen under the above parameters) and a list of private scholarships. Each listing gives the award amount, the application deadline, and a description of the scholarship including eligibility requirements. You can hit the Apply Here button and go to the sponsoring website or hit Send and email the scholarship information to your computer or a friend. (It would be a bonus if the email fields—especially the From field—were linked to your contacts so you didn’t have to input every last letter.) You’re also able to save any interesting scholarships to My Plan.

Our profile gave us a list of three school-specific scholarships and 59 private scholarships. Notable among the private scholarships were the frequently seen “big-box” awards from companies like Coca-Cola, General Mills, and Kohl’s. There were also 22 contests on the list and some of the ubiquitous “scholarships” from scholarship search websites. Not much of anything new on this list.

Sail is another new app that we think has a lot of potential for the future. No huge amount of information sharing is required, it’s got some nice features, it’s pretty easy to use, and the 99 cent sticker price is pretty painless. That said, the quality of its scholarship listings could use some improvement. The listings aren’t that bad, but they aren’t very interesting either, and certainly not up to the quality you can find on some scholarship websites. Nevertheless, this is one to try out and keep an eye on.

We gave Sail 2.5 out of 5:

2 1/2 Mortar Board Rating

 

 

 

Scholly for Scholarship Hunters on the Go

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SchollyScholly Mobile App

Available at the iTunes App Store

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/scholly-scholarship-search/id640381740?mt=8

http://www.myscholly.com/

Scholly is a relatively new app for your smartphone that lets you conduct a mobile search for scholarships. It was created by CEO Christopher Gray to make finding and applying for scholarships easier, and on a device suited to the way many of the college bound are accessing the Internet. Priced at just 99 cents, it’s a snap to test it out.

Working with the app is easy. Enter the eight search parameters: state, race, GPA, gender, need/merit based, grade, major, and miscellaneous, and then tap on Search. All fields need to be filled out to continue. (Note: There is a listing for None under Miscellaneous if no others apply.) No other information sharing is required. Tapping on an individual entry brings up a detail page with a description of the scholarship, eligibility requirements, the application deadline, and a button to go to the sponsoring website. You can save the scholarships you like and email the results to yourself or a friend to investigate in more depth.

You can sort your results by award amount, deadline, or name. For our parameters, we got 119 results. Of those, 78 were labeled as “deadline passed.” There were also a number of familiar contests on this list, but there were some listings that were new to us too. All of the listings are said to be “hand-picked” as the real deal before they go into the database.

Scholly is very easy to use and a great idea, reaching lots of people who use their phone instead of a computer to negotiate the Internet. It seems unlikely that you can actually apply for the scholarship this way and will eventually need to use a computer, but this can give you a list to start from. Scholly needs a little more tweaking, however. More than half of the results we got were past deadline—something that would seem easy to resolve. In any case, give Scholly a try. Although it doesn’t really measure up to the results you can get with one of the better scholarship websites, we think it’s got a lot of potential and may be a future big player in the scholarship search arena.

We give Scholly 3 out of 5:

3 Mortar Board Rating

 

 

Related Links:

Scholly USA Today article

Scholly on TechCrunch