Scholarship Guide: Essays... Yes or No?

Write a cause and effect essay and have an English teacher help you edit it and evolve it over and over. Most scholarships ask you for this kind of essay so you can shorten it or lengthen it and use it over and over. There are a few essays you should write and be able to use them over and over.

No matter what the essay is, short or long, have at least one person read through and edit it. You don’t want to immediately lose out on a scholarship because of a spelling mistake.

Write something original to yourself, and appropriate for the prompt.

Here are 3 things you may want to avoid in your scholarship essays:

1. Spitting Back the Essay Prompt

   • Can you imagine how boring it would be to read the same opening sentence over and over again? There’s no need to include this for any reason. Trust me. Scholarship providers know what their scholarship prompts are and don’t need to be reminded. 

2. Using Quotes

   • Don’t get me wrong, an obscure quote can work well in an academic paper, but in general you should avoid using them in scholarship essays. Why? Chances are the quote you will choose is going to be used by several other students, which means your ‘original’ essay isn’t so original anymore. If you must use a quote, use one of your own. That might actually get someone’s attention!

3. Introducing Yourself

• Unless the scholarship essay instructions specifically state that you must include your name in your paper, don’t start your essay by introducing yourself. It may actually disqualify you from advancing. Many scholarship committees conduct blind readings. This means a reader cannot have any information pertaining to you. Even if the scholarship prompt asks you to share some information about yourself, refrain from starting your essay in this fashion. Instead, begin with something memorable from your life that will leave a lasting impression with your reader.

Scholarship Guide: Google tips

Here are some good phrases for the Google-verse to start your research off right:

• Seasons: "Spring scholarship", "fall scholarship"

• Year/Deadline: "2018 deadline scholarships", “Semi annual scholarship"

• Grade: "High school senior scholarship"

• School specific scholarship: "University of Texas scholarship"

• State: "Illinois scholarship" 

• City: "Chicago scholarship"

• Race: "Mexican scholarship", "minority scholarship", etc.

• Citizenship: “DACA scholarship”, etc.

• Gender/sexual orientation: "woman scholarship" "LGBT scholarship"

• Job: "dentist scholarship" "engineer scholarship"

• Favorite companies: "Chipotle scholarship", "Cosco scholarship", "KFC scholarship"

• Try using contest:  "essay contest", "poetry contest"

• Others: “no essay scholarship”, "no gpa scholarship"

Scholarship Guide: Decent sites + why I like them

I’ll keep this one simple with just a list.

• Unigo

  • They have a good, user-friendly categorization of their scholarship database

• Cappex 

  • They help sort by deadline so you can prioritize your list of scholarships to apply to.

  • They provide some awesome financial aid info about each college (like average debt at graduation, percent of need met, etc) so you can think about your college investment.

• Scholly

  • Instagram account with scholarship info and tips for managing the financial aid process.

  • Easy to navigate and incorporate into your daily phone-scrolling habits so you can prioritize doing a little bit of work on financial aid every day.

• JLV Counselling

  • You can sign up for her weekly newsletter where she will send out unique scholarship opportunities that have upcoming deadlines.

  • Easy way to help manage your time - when you get her email, that can remind you to get to work that night!!

• Reddit

  • People always share tips & tricks from their own experience. Do some research on Reddit to find weird scholarships, sample essay drafts, and other people’s scholarship struggles and triumphs. 

• UNCF

  • Students of color especially should take advantage of the UNCF network. They help you find scholarships, internships, and jobs down the line! Register to be in their network ASAP!

Scholarship Guide: Basic Tips & Tricks

Time: 

Prioritize the scholarships with earlier deadlines. They will have less competition, and you can better manage your time applying when the deadline is sooner. Many early-deadline scholarships end up having excess funds because they did not have enough applicants.

Competition: 

Look for scholarships that you think will have a smaller pool of applicants. This is a broad piece of advice, and it could mean a few things:

• Focus on unique traits about you (scholarships that only allow female candidates will shrink the pool by 50%, so even more unique traits will shrink the pool even more!)

• Earlier deadlines (a lot of students will wait to apply for scholarships til the last minute, meaning they’ll miss many of the early-deadline scholarships)

• Essay-based scholarships scare some students off

• Awards that do not have a set dollar amount also scare students off - you never know how much a scholarship might add up to if it says it is a “varying” amount!

Eligibility: 

Make sure you read the eligibility requirements so you don’t waste your time. It can be a pain to read the fine print, but it can save you time in the long-run! This goes both ways:

1. If the name of the scholarship sounds like it doesn’t apply to you, like “Tiger Woods Award Scholarship” but you have never picked up a golf club in your life, you should still read on to see if there are any golf-related requirements. Sometimes, there aren’t any, and you will have missed a unique opportunity for yourself!

2. If the name of the scholarship sounds like it applies to you but you didn’t read the requirements, and suddenly your 3.85 GPA doesn’t meet their 3.90 GPA requirement, you’ll have wasted your time applying.

Essays: 

Don’t be afraid of the essay-required scholarships for a few reasons: the applicant pools will be smaller (meaning less competition), you can often just tweak your personal statement or another essay you already wrote to fit better with the essay prompt, and they’re often the higher dollar amount scholarships.

Dollar: 

Two things… (1) YES. The small-dollar scholarships DO add up, and (2) don’t be scared away by scholarship whose dollar amount “varies”. You never know when it will vary all the way up to $10k!! Think about it as an investment. If you win a $500 scholarship and it took you 2 hours to apply, you just made $250 an hour.