Scholarship Essay Examples:
As I have emphasized in many posts on Money for College Students, applying for scholarships is one of the key factors in finding sufficient money to finance your college education. However, getting these scholarships obviously isn’t a walk in the park for most and involves a substantial amount of time and effort in completing the applications on your part. Aside from your outstanding academic and extracurricular record, your application essay is the key to winning most scholarships. So I am going to dedicate a few articles to scholarship essay examples and how to write a scholarship essay in order that you will guarantee yourself to win that important scholarship. In this article I will give a basic outline of what you should include in a scholarship essay that will blow the reader away, and I will shortly be following it up with scholarship essay examples that have won people nice scholarships in the past.
So here is an example of an outline for an effective scholarship essay. The following are topics that should highly consider including in your scholarship essay.
1- You should start out any scholarship essay with a catchy first paragraph. In this paragraph you should begin to explain who you are, and what your future plans and goals are.
2- Somewhere in the scholarship essay you should explain why this scholarship is important to you and how will help you to achieve your future academic, career, community service, etc. goals.
3- In addition to that, you need to describe why you are the most qualified for this scholarship (without specifically saying “I am qualified the most” or anything to that effect…sounds to cocky)
4- When writing in your scholarship essay why you are the most qualified for the scholarship, this is the time where you get to tie in extracurricular/academic activities/accomplishments that have proven your leadership and extraordinary abilities as a student that will ascertain to the reader that you will use this scholarship to accomplish great things.
5- Wrap up your scholarship with a summary of the information above and some sort of a creative ending.
As you will see in the scholarship essay examples that I post on this website, another key to writing an effective, winning scholarship essay is creativity and originality. Figure out how to write your scholarship essay so that it stands out from most others, even if your competition consists of bright 4.0+ students like yourself. This is one of the factors that really helps determine whether you will win a scholarship or not.
Sometime by this weekend I will post some sample scholarship essays that would be highly competitive in winning a scholarship. See you again then!
May 14, 2009
