As you begin your final year of high school, scholarship opportunities are often easy to overlook. Whether you're looking for a prom dress, checking your OUAC status every few minutes or attending a university open house, scholarships may be the last thing on your mind! Luckily, Studentosity is here to help support you through this exhausting process. Instead of reviewing the specifics of essay formatting and structure, this guide will help you curate the content of your essay to showcase your best side to a scholarship committee!
Written by Simrit Rana
1) Use your past writing to its greatest potential
Look for inspiration in certain pieces of past writing that showcase your strongest qualities or valuable experiences. Instead of starting from scratch, this helps you to simply choose excerpts of your past writing and modify them to the specific audience you are writing for, which in turn is less time-consuming.
TIP: Use a google drive folder to easily organize your past writing under broader topics, (i.e. overcoming obstacles, my greatest successes), so that it’s easily accessible in the future.
2) Find what makes you YOU!
Oftentimes, you may not have a database of great writing about yourself to draw from, so you must instead start the brainstorming process. What life experiences have led to the most academic/personal growth in your life and will equally allow you to reflect your strengths?
The narrative you craft is more important than a pretentious title, so instead of worrying about your lack of an academically attractive life experience, focus on what your experience has taught you and how you navigate your life differently as a result. For example, you may not have founded your school's robotic club but your experiences as a mentor, educating freshmen on robotics, led you to develop a meaningful passion for the field. Even if an experience is minimal in your eyes, brainstorming it's impact on your life may help you to realize it has helped you to become the person you are today.
TIP: Brainstorm your 3 most valuable strengths (i.e. leadership, collaboration) and use a different experience to back up each one. Save these pieces of writing for future use.
3) Tell a story
Small details will do wonders for painting the picture of your life. In choosing descriptive words, you are able to develop a specific tone and mood for your essay. When narrating an event you have experienced, showing emotion helps the reader to become personally invested in what you're saying and makes for memorable essays. You can open up about times where you felt nervous or scared, as it shows maturity and self-awareness. However, keep an overall tone of positivity and self-growth throughout your essay. Don't focus on the negatives, highlight how these experiences have left you positively impacted. Re-read your essay every few days, as your preference of wording will be constantly changing
TIP: Instead of deleting the writing you dislike, save many drafts of your essay to refer back to.
4) Make your essay stand out!
If the prompt is asking for your opinion on a certain topic, oftentimes the first answers that come to mind will be the most common in a sea of essays. Eliminate these answers from your trajectory, and commit to the taxing job of crafting your unique thoughts. If you do not come from a traditional academic or cultural background, don't try to 'mainstream' your application, since the goal is to stand out from other applicants. Don't be afraid to expand on details about your culture that are essential to understanding who you are.
5) Proofread and ask for help
Don't be afraid to ask a mentor for advice about your essay. Instead of asking a past English teacher that may or may not remember your name, ask someone that you have a pre-established professional relationship with. Ideally, this person isn't your immediate family so they will have an outsider perspective, but they are also not a complete stranger who is unaware of your personality. Therefore, they will provide you with critical and meaningful feedback. In the end, asking too many people for advice will only lead to conflicting ideas and self-doubt. Trust your instincts, as you have done the grueling self-evaluation work.
TIP: Jot down feedback from your proofreader as they are relaying it, since it’s easy to forget small points of criticism.
Conclusion
As an added bonus, scholarships often use similar essay prompts, or ask questions that can be answered in a similar way.
Example:
Discuss a moment or experience that caused significant personal growth.
Discuss a time when you had to overcome an obstacle.
Making slight changes in wording allows you to curate to multiple scholarships using minimal effort and time!
Though navigating scholarship season can be intimidating, developing a resilient attitude is the key to your success. Check out Studentosity’s Instagram page for various scholarship opportunities!
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