Building a Scholarship Matcher: Scraping 500+ Award Databases

Students miss out on billions in unclaimed scholarships every year simply because they don't know they exist. Let's build a scholarship matcher that scrapes award databases and matches students to opportunities they qualify for. The Scholarship Discovery Problem There are over 1.7 million private scholarships worth $7.4 billion annually. Most students only apply to a handful because finding relevant ones is tedious. A scholarship matcher solves this by aggregating data from hundreds of sources and using NLP to match student profiles. Data Sources Key scholarship databases to scrape: Fastweb, Scholarships.com, Cappex College Board Scholarship Search State-specific scholarship portals Professional association awards Community foundation directories Setting Up pip install requests beautifulsoup4 pandas scikit-learn schedule Using ScraperAPI for JavaScript-heavy scholarship sites: import requests from bs4 import BeautifulSoup import json SCRAPER_KEY = " YOUR_SCRAPERAPI_KEY " def fetch ( ur