Does ScholarPal apply to scholarships for me?
No. ScholarPal is a self-serve matching tool, not an agency or consultancy. We track 800+ scholarships and rank them against your profile so you can find the right ones fast — but you review each match, and you apply yourself through the scholarship’s official website. Nobody on our team applies on your behalf, and no legitimate scholarship requires a middleman.
Can the ScholarPal team find scholarships for me manually?
The platform is the search. Everything our team knows about matching scholarships to your situation is built into the matching engine — creating a profile gives you the same answer we would give you by hand, instantly and kept up to date. If you email us asking for a manual search, we will point you right back to your matches page.
How does the matching actually work?
First we apply hard eligibility gates: nationality, degree level, and minimum test scores a scholarship requires. Anything you are not eligible for is filtered out. Then everything that passes is scored across weighted categories — eligibility strength, field alignment, financial fit, geography, deadlines, and more — and ranked. You can adjust the priorities from your profile.
Why am I seeing few or no matches?
Almost always: an incomplete profile. Hard gates need your nationality, degree level, and field to work — if they are missing, we cannot safely say you are eligible for much. Fill out the profile fields flagged on your dashboard, especially education level, citizenship, and field of study, and your match list will grow immediately.
A recommendation looks wrong for me. What do I do?
Use the thumbs-down ("not relevant") button on the scholarship card. That feedback goes straight into improving the ranking — it is the single most useful thing you can do to make your own future matches better.
Is ScholarPal really free? What’s the catch?
Free forever, for every feature. No premium tier, no commission, no selling your data. The project exists to make scholarship access more equitable for Palestinian, refugee, and MENA students. You can delete your account and data at any time.
How up to date are the scholarships and deadlines?
The catalog is refreshed by automated scrapers on a daily and weekly cycle, and every scholarship URL is health-checked so dead links get flagged and repaired. Deadlines still change without notice, so always confirm on the official page before you plan an application — and if you spot something wrong, report it from the scholarship page or send it via the contact form.
Can you review my essays or documents?
Not individually — but the Journey planner breaks each application into steps (what to prepare first, admission vs. scholarship order), and our guides cover essays, recommendation letters, and interviews for the major programs.
Can I send a scholarship to a friend on WhatsApp?
Yes — every scholarship page has WhatsApp, Telegram and copy-link buttons under the apply section. The link opens the full scholarship page, so whoever you send it to can read the eligibility rules and apply directly without creating an account. If you know someone who cannot browse easily right now, forwarding them one specific scholarship is far more useful than sending them a search page.
Does ScholarPal work when my connection drops?
Partly, and it is worth knowing which parts. Scholarships you have already opened stay readable without a connection, and reloading the app shows your saved matches instead of a browser error — so a page you already paid data for is not lost when the signal goes. What needs a connection: signing in, saving a new scholarship, and updating your profile. If you try one of those while offline you will see it fail rather than appear to succeed, because a saved application you never actually saved is worse than an error message. Add ScholarPal to your home screen and it opens like an app, straight from the cache.
How do I contact the team?
For missing scholarship sources, bugs, or feedback, use the contact page — suggestions go into a review queue we triage every week. Questions about your own matches are answered fastest by the pages above, since the platform always has fresher information than an email reply.
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