How to Write an Amazing College Scholarship Essay
You have your letters of recommendation, scholarship resume, and have carefully filled out the scholarship application. All you need to do now is write the winning essay. What can you write about that will get the attention of the scholarship judges? Where do you start? What is the secret to writing an essay that will help you win the scholarship money?
The first thing you need to do is understand that the point of a scholarship essay is for the judges to get to know YOU. They want to know more than your name, date of birth, GPA, standardized test score, etc... The essay allows you to let the judges know your thoughts, feelings, and opinions on whatever subject they want you to write about. They don't want to know facts that they can easily learn from your scholarship application, so refrain from starting your essay with something like, "My name is __________ and I go to _________ high school".
What you need to do to quickly get the attention of the judges (who have read possibly thousands of essays) is to start your essay with a compelling statement. Draw them in right away and create in them the desire to read your whole essay from start to finish because they WANT to, not because they HAVE to. How do you do this? Read over the subject of the essay, form your own opinion, and then write your first sentence with a personal experience that you feel strongly about. For example, when you answer the popular essay question, "How will the scholarship money help you?" you can write something like, "Sleeping in on Saturday mornings is something that I love to do, but for the past year I have literally dragged myself out of bed so I can go to my local children's hospital and read stories to the kids who are patients there...." Then you write about how winning the scholarship money will bring you one step closer to realizing your dream of becoming a pediatrician.
Make yourself real to the judges. You are much more than a name on a flat piece of paper! Your essay allows you to come alive in the judge's minds, so help them use their imagination to see you with lots of descriptive words, heartfelt emotions, and real life situations. Use a thesaurus to help you use words that make yourself stand out and be remembered. Always tell the truth. Never lie in your scholarship essays. Don't have a parent write your essay for you. After reading so many essays, scholarship judges KNOW which students wrote the essays themselves, which ones stretch the truth, and which ones want to win so bad that they will say anything that makes them look better that the other applicants.
Scholarship essays are a way for the judges to get to know YOU on a deeper level. When you draw them in from the beginning of your essay, tell the truth, and write from your heart, your chances of winning the scholarship money are much greater. To win scholarships, you need to learn how to create a scholarship application that gets noticed by the judges out of all the other applicants.
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