The Nature of Scholarships and Their Types

Scholarships are financial aid for meritorious students or those undergoing hardship and would not be able to continue their education without it. There are many types of scholarships available for both American and international students, and several www and dot com resources on the internet can give you considerable information regarding their application procedures and other relevant stuff.

WWW, Dot Com and Internet: Not Synonymous

A note on the common confusion between www and the internet. The word www stands for the World Wide Web. This is only a part of the internet, which contains many things other than the web, there is e-mail, IRC, instant messaging, video conferencing, DNS, and hundreds of other uses for the internet, many of which you have probably not even heard of. WWW and dot com sites, though important, are only a small part of this huge complex.
Scholarships are mainly of three types, and information about all these types are available through specialized dot com sites on the www.

Scholarships in Detail: Merit Based

First, there are the merit-based scholarships, which do not take account of your actual needs. These may be based on intellectual merit, or some other criterion like athletic or artistic excellence. Merit scholarships often offer only token amounts of money, because they aren't meant to solve financial problems, only to encourage the student to do even better. You can find a number of dot com sites on the www that give information about merit scholarships.

Scholarships in Detail: Need and Ethnicity Based

Then there are scholarships which truly aim to help students in need to tide over their financial crunch and continue their course of study. These are need-based scholarships. Thirdly, a subset of this type of aid consists of those that are applicable only to a particular ethnic group or locality. For example, there may exist scholarships which are meant only for Basque students, or only those who come to attend university courses from a particular village in Iowa. You can find info about all these on the www, on several dot com sites.