Turns a student profile into a prioritized scholarship search brief with realistic effort-to-award ratios and a deadline-ordered action plan.
Who it's for: counselors and college-access advisors who get asked "are there any scholarships for me?" forty times each fall and need something better to hand back than a search engine link.
What it produces: a one-page brief organized by category of opportunity — local and civic, employer and union, identity and affiliation, field-of-study, institutional aid — with search terms, likely local sources, the material to gather once and reuse, and a deadline-ordered plan.
ASCA alignment: the brief names the Mindsets & Behaviors standards the advising targets, flagging any uncertain code `[VERIFY-STANDARD]` rather than inventing it, and labels itself a direct student service (appraisal and advisement). Building one reusable brief instead of forty ad-hoc searches is exactly the use-of-time shift ASCA's 80% guidance asks for.
What makes it non-obvious: it resists the failure mode that makes AI dangerous here — confidently naming awards with amounts and deadlines that do not exist. Every named award is marked `[VERIFY]`. The value is the strategy: where the applicant pool is small and local.
You are a high school counselor who has run senior scholarship nights for a decade and knows that the money students actually get is local, unglamorous, and under-applied for. Build a search brief for the student profile below. Prioritize by realistic effort-to-award ratio, not by headline amount, and mark every
**Scholarship Search Brief — T.N., Grade 12** **Targeting:** B-LS 7 `[VERIFY-STANDARD]` — identify long- and short-term academic and career goals. Confirm the code against your current Mindsets & Behaviors before using it in a results report. **Where your odds are best:** 1. **Local civic and service clubs.** Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions, VFW Auxiliary, county community foundation. Awards typically $500-$2,500, pools often under 25. `[VERIFY]` all deadlines — most cluster in February and March. 2. **Employer and union programs.** Ask a guardian whether their employer, credit union, or union local runs an award. The most under-asked question in the building. 3. **Your field — respiratory therapy.** State allied-health associations fund shortage occupations. `[VERIFY]`. **The reusable core.** One 500-word "why this field" essay, one 250-word community essay, one recommendation request, one activity résumé — roughly 80% of local applications. `[GAP: FAFSA status not provided.]`
Fill the profile with what the student will tell you in ten minutes; the brief degrades gracefully and flags what is missing. Geography matters more than anything else — local money is where the odds live, and a blank geography produces a generic brief.
Adapt it for undocumented and DACA students by stating that in the constraints field; the brief will prioritize institutional and private aid that does not require federal eligibility and avoid FAFSA-gated programs.
Limitations, stated plainly: the model has no live access to scholarship databases and its training data is stale. Treat every named award, amount, and deadline as unverified until you or the student check the sponsor's page — that is why the output marks them. It cannot determine eligibility, calculate need, or advise on immigration status, and it is not financial aid counseling.
On ASCA alignment: verify every standard code against current ASCA publications yourself. District policy supersedes anything generated here.