Winning Scholarships: Tips & Advice

Here are a few tips and practical advice to keep in mind when applying for scholarships, which will help increase your chances of winning a few. I will also share my story to give you a concrete example. For a list of actual scholarships, I created a post listing several individual scholarships and scholarship programs called The Scholarship Big List.

Scholarship Tips

In general, scholarship organizations want to award students who they think is most-likely going to be successful in college and post-college, and that is generally exemplified by a student who not only has a passion for something, but has actually done things related to their passions. They also want to choose students who will most-likely impact their communities. The best way to convince them that you are a student who will be successful, a leader, and impactful in your essay response is share stories and accomplishments that are creative and unique, and stories that show that you take action when you are passionate about something.

Sometimes students say that they are passionate about an individual or multiple subjects, but don’t have much or anything to show for it. In order to write a good essay, you need something to talk about. If you say you are passionate about computers have you learned or taught yourself how to program and built apps? If you say you are passionate about quality of education in this country, have you volunteered as a tutor or created your own classes to teach?

The following are a few tips and pieces of advice to consider if you want to build a strong profile:

  1. You will be rejected by more scholarships than accepted, so apply to as many as possible.
  2. Applying for scholarships is a full-time job, and can be stressful, so start ASAP, and do not wait until your senior year.
  3. Most scholarships are due by December or January of your Senior year, so technically you only have 3 & 1/2 years to prepare for scholarships instead of 4 full years of high school. Start building your portfolio/resume early.
  4. Most scholarships ask similar questions in their essays, so you should write at least five to ten different essays that cover those generic topics. This will help you become mindful of what you want to achieve in your academic and post-academic career, and will also help sharpen your ability to communicate to college admissions and scholarship programs on why they should accept you.
  5. Try to gain over 100 volunteer hours. You can volunteer for anything, but a good starting point is volunteering for something related to what you are passionate about. How can you take your strongest assets, and use it to help your community. Here are a few ideas:
    • Tutoring kids at your high school
    • Tutoring elementary school kids
    • Volunteering at the Boys & Girls Club
    • Volunteering at your local food bank
    • Gather a group of friends, and start a club that does community service related to the areas you care about. If for whatever reason your school does not approve of making it an official school sponsored club, do it outside of school.
    • Teaching a skill that you know: web design, instruments, fitness, etc.
    • Making print and digital marketing material such as flyers and powerpoint slides for charities.
    • Volunteer at a hospital.
  6. Here are some common questions asked in scholarship applications, so start writing essays and thinking about these:
    • What are you passionate about, and what have you actually done to show for it?
    • How have you impacted your community?
    • Have you ever lead a team, or taken a leadership role?
    • What was one of the most difficult challenges you’ve faced at school, work, in a project or competition, and how did you overcome it?
    • How do you plan to impact your community with the college degree that you will earn?

My Story

I won the Gates Millennium Scholarship provided by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in high school. It paid for the majority of my college education, which allowed me to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study Computer Science & Linguistics.

About 22,000 students applied, but only 1000 students received this award. I started looking for scholarships as a freshman in high school, and I stumbled upon this scholarship on Fastweb.com, and saved it in my back pocket until I was a senior. Due to the odds of winning this scholarship (approx. 4%), I was hesitant about applying, but later thought,  I had a unique story to tell. I was also active in pursuing my passion, which was entrepreneurship and technology.

The GMS scholarship had 9 essay questions for which I wrote a total of 22 pages, and required two recommendation letters. To prove that I was passionate about entrepreneurship and technology in my essays, I actually taught myself web design, and done a few freelance projects. I competed in business plan competitions in DECA and FBLA. From sophomore to senior year of high school, I won regional and state awards in several business categories: food marketing, management, web design, business plan, investment capital pitch, and business plan presentation. I attended a weekend accounting program at Belmont University the summer after my Sophomore year, and attended Tennessee’s Governor’s School for Business and IT the summer after my Junior year. I also took the majority of the business classes that my school had to offer: Marketing, Accounting, Personal Finance, and Virtual Enterprise, and won Student of the Year in all of them except for Personal Finance.

In order to show that I had a unique story to tell, I talked about my experience going through Hurricane Katrina. Not too many students across the country had that story to tell. From a numbers perspective, out of 50 states, this event heavily affected 3: Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida. New Orleans received the longest lasting affect post-Katrina forcing over 300,000 residents to relocate permanently. We can narrow the number of students with that story down even further because only a hand-full of them were high school seniors applying for the GMS scholarship the same year as I.

Beyond the surface of simply talking about the experience of my family having to relocate from New Orleans to Nashville, I was conscious of the difference in education quality as well as the difference in diversity. In my essays I shared my opinion of the education disparity that exists in certain parts of the country, which I was not aware of as a pre-teen until I was forced to relocate to a different city. I talked about the culture shock of moving to a city whose school system was more diverse than the one I previously attended, and how that shaped my opinion of the world going into me teen years.

Lastly, I needed to acquire two recommendation letters. Since I wanted to pursue college for Computer Science, I asked my Calculus and Physics teachers to write recommendation letters for me. I believe that it is better to ask for recommendation letters from teachers who are familiar with the field or category of opportunity you are trying to pursue. Although my high school did not have Computer Science classes, Computer Science is heavily dependent on Math and Science, so a Calculus and Physics teachers were perfect candidates. A teacher who is familiar with your target domain will be the best at explaining why you will succeed in that domain. It is extremely important that you build relationships and trust with your teachers long before you ask for a recommendation letter. This way they will have a stronger sense of your personality and what it is that you want to achieve in life, and with that information, they will be able to write an excellent recommendation letter. I would go to a lot of after school tutoring sessions with my teachers whether I needed help or not, and have conversations with them outside of class study.

The take away form my story is that you should start thinking about what you want to do with your future as a career and in college immediately. Try to find that passion and start working on concrete activities in relation to that passion. Try to think outside the box, and start doing things that will help you stand out. Become conscious of the world around you by forming your own educated opinions of problems that affect your community, and how you would like to solve them. These tips will lead to you writing an essay unique to you, and prove that you not only talk-the-talk, but walk-the-walk.

 

NOTE: Here is a news story done on a student named Kristina Ellis who earned $500,000 worth of scholarships, which helped her attend Vanderbilt University: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/how-i-earned–500-000-in-scholarships-212534881.html