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[previous article] [next article]Starr Williams
Wouldn't it be great if we all had the talent to get a full-ride academic or athletic scholarship to pay for school? I know it sounds good, but let's get real. We all can not be the All- American athlete or the school valedictorian. Luckily the Division of Financial Aid is aware of this and is offering an online scholarship searching service to all Purdue University students through the Student Services Information System (SSINFO).
This student service provides students with a listing of the
available private scholarships that meet their personal
criteria. To begin this search, the student will first have to
do a remote login to the oasis machine to access the ssinfo
program. This is accomplished by typing
rlogin oasis.cc.purdue.edu -l ssinfo
To proceed successfully, I discovered I needed to use the "Cc"
option to set my terminal type. In my case I needed to use
VT100; however, your terminal type may be different. If you are
not sure which option to use for your machine, contact a
terminal room consultant or your site specialist. Now that you
are logged into "ssinfo" you can select Student Services Public
Information (#2) and then select Scholarship Search (#8) to
bring up the scholarship searching screen. This is the screen
that appears.
SCREENDUMP displayed here
From this screen you will want to read General Introduction to the Scholarship Search (#1) and How to Apply for Scholarships (#2), but it is Conducting Your Personal Search Through Selected Criteria (#3) where you begin to interact with this program.
If you are like me, you probably have no clue as to what code to enter into the spaces. If you press the "?" a sub-screen will appear to the left with the codes that correspond to the criteria item you are filling in.
SCREENDUMP displayed here
Press the escape button to select the code that describes you. You will then be asked whether or not you want to include the scholarships that are specific to that criteria. The cursor will move down to the next criteria line and you can begin this process again.
After you have entered in all the information about yourself,
you press "control-e" and the scholarship search will begin. A
list of scholarships that meet your criteria should appear and
you can choose which scholarships might be useful to you. You
will be given information concerning the scholarship such as the
address, description, and deadline of the scholarship.
Do not panic if you get the message "No scholarships match your personal criteria", all this means is that you have been too specific with your personal information. In my own search for scholarships I have found that being too specific returned very few (or zero) listings and no limits returned too many listings. You might want to take this into consideration when you begin your scholarship search. It took me a number of tries before I began to get results that were useful to me.
The next step is yours! It is your responsibility to contact the scholarship donor, to get more information or to make application. This is NOT done for you by Financial Aid. Try this simple and helpful service for students who are in search of awaiting financial opportunities. Good Luck with your scholarship search.
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