The line between a scholarship and an advertisement is becoming frighteningly thin. Scrolling through websites like Bold.org or Niche.com presents a user with endless scholarships funded by magazines and newsletters, wherein students must subscribe to, and presumably read, their content in order to qualify. These organizations likely score hundreds if not thousands of subscribers from aid-seeking students, and only have to shell out around 1,000 to the winner. Bold.org, especially, is a prime example of how advertisement-polluted a scholarship platform can become. Their system of rewarding users with "bold points" for downloading sponsored browser extensions or listening to sponsored podcasts, all with the promise of a scholarship at the end, is draining and, frankly, feels very predatory. As a relatively low-income student who is dependent on scholarships to help fund my future education, it's exhausting to scroll through an endless sea of thinly-veiled advertisements and soulless marketing tactics trying to find genuine scholarships seeking to help real students. Browsing Bold.com, I find myself face-to-face with various tactics I recognize from classes on marketing tactics; frantic countdowns on "limited-time offers," prompting me to install a plugin or make an account in the next two minutes for a "7x higher" chance to be awarded a scholarship. Flashy numbers, big percentages, and promises of easy money pollute my screen, when all I want is to finance my education-- my future. I feel that my generation is often able to recognize with relative ease when they're being marketed to and, depending on how overbearing it is, they might not even mind. I, too, have grown relatively desensitized to being advertised to in every day life, though I was absolutely not expecting to find such blatant, shameless, soulless advertising tactics on a website intended for struggling students. I know I shouldn't complain about this-- after all, who cares about your inbox being spammed if you get a thousand bucks out of it? However, I feel that in the digital age, the age of information, it's never as simple as getting your inbox spammed. Creating accounts, downloading plugins, and subscribing to newsletters involves giving my email, name, and phone number to countless organizations, which are no doubt collecting and selling whatever data they can get their hands on. As I stated, my generation is no stranger to blatant, soulless advertising and, in a similar sense, we are no strangers to the fact that every big corporation and brand likely has our name, address, date of birth, phone number, email, gender, race, likes, dislikes, habits, etc. on a profile ready to sell whenever a particular demographic is requested from an advertising agency. It's simply a fact of life that we've been forced to expect. However, to find that it has made it's way to even this corner of the internet saddens me. Applying for scholarships can be stressful-- students are constantly reminded of their financial struggles, are constantly writing out their test scores and GPAs knowing full well that those numbers could determine the entire course of their future, and are scrambling to find the right words that will give their essay the highest chance of being selected to win a scholarship. Some websites take advantage of this and use it as an opportunity to market their partnered brands, newsletters, and podcasts to stressed, overwhelmed students in promises of a higher chance at financing their future. It's exhausting and, frankly, kind of scummy, but in the digital age it seems that's the price we have to pay for our future.