In addition to writing tons of essays (for me, writing is easier than having interviews), I went to a number of rabbis in my community, and I also set up a website, and constantly spoke about how I needed to raise so much money, and then people suggested that I go to a variety of places based on what I needed, I often would ask someone to list all the places that they thought of for getting scholarships from (I did this later on in the year) and that way, I made sure I covered all my bases (which towards the end of the year, I already got money from all the places most people seemed to mention), and then I would ask if they could think of any other places, and then I got some “last resort” suggestions, and then worked on those. Basically, fundraising that amount of money while still in high school is a pretty big undertaking, I would say that I lost a ton of sleep over it, and also felt like during that time, it was all I could think about (I am very driven when it comes to meeting goals like that, which helped a lot, but also stressed me a bit as well). I also davened a ton and made sure to check in with people every once in a while to make sure I was on the top of their list of people who needed money.
Like the school I went to in 12th grade was a bais yaakov, so I could not use the internet at school, yet I had special permission to bring my laptop to school to take notes, and on days I got out earlier than everyone else (like a friday), I would occasionally go somewhere else (a Jewish organization) that would let me use their wifi, and I told them I wanted to use their wifi to search for seminary related information, and then they saw that I was serious, and helped me. Its all about strategic planning. An army will lose a war if they don’t have a strategy for the battlefield, so to, you can’t do this alone, and you need to rally up people to support you.