More Than a Test Score

McDonald's All-American? Winner of the Intel Science Prize? Congrats — Every college in America would love to pay your tuition. You can stop reading now.

For the rest of us, there's no easy way around it. College is going to be expensive. And while Zinch's scholarships are probably the sweetest (and most prestigious, obviously) out there, there's only so much love to go around. The good news is that free money is free money, and there's much more if you're willing to work a bit for it.

Here are the top five ways to get yours:

1) Scholarships — Straight up free money. The reality is that by now, each of you should have an account on the large scholarship sites, it should be updated, and you should search at least once a month for new scholarships. You'd be amazed what you can find, and studies show that putting your time into scholarship searches (if you actually take it seriously and put a little thought in) will pay you four to five times more per hour than most other jobs a high school student can get. Here are three big, well known scholarship aggregators. If you haven't already, create an account and begin searching on each.

• FastWeb.com
• ScholarshipExperts.com
• FreeScholarshipGuide.com

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My fellow Zinchers,

Today is a very special day.

Please take a moment to welcome my close friend Jeremy Johnson to the blog and the Zinch movement. He comes to us by way of Zandigo, an award winning college access start-up that he founded and in November merged into the Zinch family.

Someone I have known for years, Jeremy was also a classmate at Princeton, where he and I won the Princeton Entrepreneur's Network Competition in '06. Not only can this dude break it down on the dance floor (we were in a hip hop dance group together), but he's also a baller in hoops (though not quite at my level, of course, jk).

Basically he's a cool dude, someone I've wanted to work with again for a long time, and definitely way more than a test score. He's going to be a great addition to the team, and will help to make Zinch an even better place to see and be seen by colleges across America. Please join me in welcoming him.

Mick

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