By this time of the year, many of you are just a day or so away from submitting your FAFSA, or Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which will be critical to determining your college financial need. I have read articles that estimate the amount of Pell Grants that went unused is in the in the $2 billion to $3 billion dollar range.

Don’t wait — get it done before school starts up again. Remember, the FAFSA is free, so get started on Jan. 1 ^{. In the future, you will actually be able to complete your FAFSA sooner than this, but for 2016, you must wait until the start of the year.}

If you have also been searching and reviewing scholarships for which you are eligible, you should have a pretty decent list by now of those for which you not only qualify, but also find compelling or have some level of confidence you can win.

If you have not yet narrowed down the list you generated with all of your search efforts, do it now. Make sure you have a workable list of scholarships for which you intend to apply. You should then start prioritizing depending on the size of this list, deadlines of the scholarships and amount of work required for each.

Follow [four steps to narrow your college scholarship search.]

Before you start completing any applications or writing essays, it might be a good idea to categorize them into groups. One group might be “essay scholarships,” for example.

Once you have pooled these together you can determine whether there is enough overlap to allow you to use a single essay for more than one scholarship. Also, sorting them by deadline date and estimating the number of hours it will take to complete each one is critical.

You don’t want to get four hours deep into a scholarship and realize you won’t be able to complete it before the deadline. Be organized and save yourself the agony. This is why it is critical to prioritize and create a plan, and schedule and execute it efficiently so that you are not wasting precious time and sabotaging this critical part of going to college.

Learn to [reuse and recycle college scholarship essays.]

Once organized, you are ready to get after some of these scholarships! Armed with all of this knowledge and preparation, you can now start writing some essays, editing them according to suitability and necessity and carefully and confidently submit them.

As always, make sure you are following the instructions to each scholarship to the letter. Don’t spend hours on an essay and application and get tossed in the garbage because you didn’t thoroughly read and follow the directions.

Below are some examples of essay and resume scholarships. Some may want a specific prompt answered, others may require a basic writing sample and still others may only require a resume”from you. Maybe take a look at them and see if there is a way you could apply to more than one of them with a single essay, if with a bit of editing.

Target the [five best places to find college scholarships and grants.]

If prompts are similar or general enough and there is no rule forbidding you from doing so, you may be able to use a single essay multiple times.

As you can tell, there are many different types of essay scholarships available to you, and not all of them will be suited all of you. But, if appropriate, perhaps start with the Bird Dog Foundation Annual College Scholarship Essay Contest. You have plenty of time to apply, as the deadline is not until April 15. The first place award is $1,500 and second place is $1,000.

There is no time to waste if you are going to apply for the Albuquerque Ecologist Open Space Scholarship. The deadline is Dec. 31 — that’s today! The winning author will receive a $500 prize.

Third and last for this post — but there are tons more at Scholarships.com — is the Silver Pen Writing Competition. This award has a deadline of Feb. 27 , so you still have plenty of time to contrast and compare other scholarships you find and determine whether it is a good fit and how you might combine or reuse any of the other essays you have written. Four levels of awards are given, from $500 to $1,500.

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Make a Plan to Prioritize Your Scholarship Applications originally appeared on usnews.com