My 18 year daughter has been accepted to a prestigious private college to pursue her dream of becoming an astrophysicist. This has been her goal since she was 10 years old and built a 6" telescope. She wants to go beyond star parties and showing the glories of the universe to the general public to become an astrophysicist pushing back the frontiers of our understanding of the universe.

Significant funding is needed, but scholarship searches mostly yield spam results or recommendations to hold a car wash. Government funding (Pell and Cal Grants) is not an option.

I'm looking for high quality ideas to help her raise sufficient funds to cover private college tuition. Summer jobs help, but are not enough.

Is there something like Kickstarter.com or http://www.modestneeds.org/ already in existence to help students pursuing the sciences?

A friend recommended using PayPalto set up an online fund-raising account, link it to the '592' plan, and spread the word to friends and associates. Has anyone gone this route and willing to provide lessons learned?

For the curious, her summer job was creating the web site and building telescopes for http://www.stellarvue.com/ And this week she met with the SETI people about doing some work with them. Yes, she takes this very seriously!