In the last couple post you received many tips on
what NOT to do when applying for scholarships and
how to make your application stand out from the crowd.

Now I’ll give you a few tips on what TO do
when writing your scholarship essay.

1) Be specific.
When talking about your future plans, be specific
in terms of how they will benefit others.
For example, if you say you want to be a high school
teacher or a doctor or lawyer, that is vague and general.

Be more specific such as - I want to teach mentally and
physically challenged high school students and help them to
assimilate into the general population and lead productive lives.

Or I want to be a doctor that performs research that
leads to new drugs to reduce the effects of Alzheimer’s…
You get the idea. The more specific you are, the more
your essay will resonate with the scholarship committee.

2) Stay on topic.
Everything in your essay should be relevant to the topic
at hand. Exclude any unnecessary references to your
birthday or where you were born or how many brothers
and sisters you have. Everyone has a birthday.

This is called commodity information and will not score
any points with the judges. Unless it has some special
significance, you should leave this out of your essay.

3) Talk about what you’ve actually done.
Although you might think it sounds impressive that
you were a volunteer in your churches youth group for 4 years,
it doesn’t tell the committee what you’ve done.
You might just be showing up and “shooting the breeze”
for all they know.

Set yourself apart. Maybe your church’s youth group
served meals to the homeless in a soup kitchen one day
a week. You could say, you helped serve over 30,000 meals
to the homeless over a 4 year period. Now that stands out.

Set yourself apart from the thousands of other applicants by
being specific, staying on topic and writing about what you
have actually done and you will be remembered by the committee
members and increase your chances of winning scholarships.

To learn more about winning scholarships, an excellent
resource is available at:

www.ScholarshipMoneyInformation.com  
 

This entry was posted on Friday, April 20th, 2007 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Scholarships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.