The 1st Annual My University Money Scholarship Contest!

So last month we made our first Google cheque!  This means that enough people have clicked on our advertising to provide us with our first $100 check from the Big G.  While this is a cool milestone for us, we weren’t exactly sure what to do with the cash.  We knew that we definitely wanted to re-invest it into our company somehow, yet we are relatively small to start outsourcing, and we are enjoying getting to learn about all aspects of blogging and running a profitable internet site, so we didn’t see much need to pay for specific services.  Then we had an epiphany – we should give it away somehow.  We love having new readers come to our site and interact with us, and we really want to support people who are living the challenging life of a post-secondary student.

Our First $100 Could Be Your $100

This realization led us to design a way to give our first $100 away.  After putting our heads together we came up with an idea to hold the first annual My University Money Scholarship Contest, just as many students are returning to school for the fall semester.  For all of you out there who claim that there is never an opportunity to earn scholarship dollars if you’re not a genius, well here it is.  The contest will have nothing to do with financial need (re: if you have student loans), and will be completely merit-based.  To enter the Scholarship Contest all prospective contestants have to do is write a 500-1000 world blog-style article about their best tip for helping students in post-secondary education.  The tip can be financially-motivated, but it can also center on general lifestyle tips for students, such as time management.  Entries will also have to include two brief ideas that you would like to see written about on My University Money.  The money will be delivered via paypal to the winner as judged by J.B. and myself.  We have no way of confirming if you are actually a student or not, so we hope everyone will abide by an honour code and not enter the contest if they are not in fact a student.

Contest Rules:

1) Anyone may apply as long as they are a post-secondary student of any kind.  It does not matter if it is a trade school, college diploma program, undergraduate degree, adult education, or a graduate course of study.

2) All applications must be submitted in Microsoft Word format and attached to an email sent to myuniversitymoney(at)gmail.com.

3) All applications must include a 500-1000 word article on the topic of: “Your Best Tip For Post-Secondary Students.”

4) All applicants must include 2 suggestions for articles they would like to see in the future on My University Money.

5) The following information must be included in your application (either in the email itself, or as a Word attachment): your full name, your paypal email address (if you don’t have one of these they are super easy to setup and you should get one for future uses anyway), where you go to school, what degree/diploma/certificate you are pursuing, and a few biographical sentences about yourself.

6) The article must be new and original.  Please DO NOT try and submit anything you have published somewhere else (like on your blog for example).

7) The deadline to submit your entries is Monday, September 5^th.  The winner and runners-up will be announced Friday, September 9^th.

Judgement Criteria:

• Creativeness in helping students (ie. We all know that skipping the morning Starbucks run will save money, come up with something better).
• Ability to fully and interestingly articulate your idea.  Give us the information convincingly and entertain us with it (isn’t this what blogging is really all about?).
• Basic Grammar.  You don’t have to be Shakespeare or Dickens, but we do have to understand what you’re saying!
• All the above rules are followed.

See Your Work Published

The top 3-5 entries we be displayed on our site in the weeks to come.  We obviously reserve the right to edit any articles we receive for brevity purposes, and we also reserve the right to publish the articles in perpetuity.  The good news is that we would be happy to run your full biographic paragraph with your article, and link to your blog if you have one.  We want to give people the credit, we just don’t want to get sued!

Help Us Give Money Away

Please help us get the word out!  We have a growing readership base, but we would like to extend this unique offer to as many people as possible.  If you could post a link to our contest on your site, or let others know about it in anyway possible we would be much obliged.  We realize that $100 isn’t going to pay off anyone’s student loans, but hey, it’s all we’ve got, and you could get it with about an hour’s work or so.  If you don’t win the grand prize, it is a great opportunity to get some publicity for your blog, or achieve some exposure for a cause that you believe can greatly help students.  Tell anyone you know that might be interested to apply.  We look forward to reading all of your entries and suggestions.  Both J.B. and myself are really excited about this contest, and we hope that by this time next year our finances will have improved to the point where we can offer not only a larger grand prize, but some secondary prizes as well.  Please contact us if you have absolutely any questions or comments.  We check our email everyday and will respond immediately, we promise it won’t be a waste of time.  Stay tuned as we will be doing more giveaways and contests in the near future!