Michigan Based Startup Booklify.com Announces First Ever Scholarship Fund
East Lansing, Michigan (PRWEB) October 28, 2014 -- Michigan based startup Booklify.com was founded two years ago to help save students money on their textbooks. Now, the company is establishing a statewide scholarship competition that will award $2,500 to help students in Michigan dealing with the rising costs of higher education.
To enter, applicants must first meet certain prerequisites, including a minimum GPA requirement. They are then tasked with addressing one of two essay topics regarding financial problems currently plaguing students and how they can be solved. The first essay asks them to do so from the viewpoint of their university’s administration, while the second essay approaches the problem from the perspective of a new startup company. Students are encouraged to think outside the box and to utilize various social media platforms as they offer creative, new solutions to the issues they have chosen to discuss.
The Booklify Merit Student Scholarship will be awarded to three students based upon a combination of credentials with $2,500 in total funds available to students. Booklify.com will award a grand prize of $1,250 to the most deserving applicant based upon the quality of the essay, scholastic achievement, student need and the creative use of social media. Runner up prizes of $750 and $500 will be awarded as well based on the same credentials. A panel of three qualified and impartial judges will evaluate applications. This panel consists of Brian Mosallam, a member of the Michigan State University’s Board of Trustees, David Carroll, Vice President at Quicken Loans, and Jake Cohen, a partner at Dan Gilbert’s Detroit Venture Partners investment group.
“We started Booklify.com as a response to the unprecedented rise in the cost of obtaining a college degree,” said Darin Gross, the company’s founder and CEO. “The average student spends over $1,000 on textbooks each school year, so the scholarship will go towards solving tangible problems facing some extremely talented and deserving kids."
“Our hope is that we can raise awareness regarding the rising costs of higher education, progressing the conversation towards more practical solutions such as Booklify.com. We believe that students, who encounter these rising costs first hand, have insights that simply need to be heard, and we hope to empower students wishing to speak out against the vast financial obstacles they must overcome in order to get their degrees,” he concluded.
About Booklify.com:
When Darin Gross founded Booklify.com during his senior year at Michigan State University, the goal was simple: to get students fair pricing for used textbooks. He noticed on campus that whether you were buying or selling used textbooks, it did not seem like students were receiving fair compensation.
To solve this glaring problem, Darin created an online marketplace for his peers to buy and sell textbooks directly from each other. By removing the middleman from the equation, ridiculously high profit margins that otherwise would be collected by campus bookstores could then be redistributed and shared between buyer and seller (Students).
“We see our business model as a win-win for our users,” states the company’s founder. “Booklify.com enables sellers to get more money back for their books while simultaneously reducing costs for buyers.”
Two years later, Booklify.com has developed from its humble beginnings at Michigan State University to four more campuses in Michigan [Western Michigan University, Central Michigan University, Grand Valley State University, and Oakland University], with plans to expand to even more campuses in the state by 2015. During fall semester of 2014, the site saw over 3,500 new users listing more than 2,400 textbooks for sale.
Darin Gross, Booklify, http://Booklify.com, +1 248-884-7400, [email protected]
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