Steps To Sure Winning Of Scholarship With A Perfect Essay
Are you dreaming of free education? That’s totally possible and can be achieved with a well-crafted scholarship essay that will win you payment for studies.
Are you a school graduate whose high time for considering further education is gradually approaching? Ideally, your family has been saving costs for your studies for the past hundred years, and now you are free to choose any college or university depending on your interests and aspirations. But what should you do if the scenario is not ideal, and your family lacks money for your education, while you are dreaming of a higher educational diploma and a decent career! No need to fall in despair – you may win a scholarship and study free of charge! How to do that? More about the tricks of writing a winning scholarship essay and attracting the committee’s attention to you as a personality and a prospective student is here.
Tips for Making an Ideal Scholarship Essay
Though applicants commonly tend to associate scholarship essays, admission essays, and personal statements with one kind of work – applying to the educational establishment for something (be it admission for studies or a scholarship), these kinds of writing are essentially different. Hence, when composing them, you should also approach the topic differently. For instance:
- You can’t choose a topic when composing a scholarship essay – this is usually allowed only in admission pieces. When writing for a scholarship, you usually have to write on the topic given by the establishment, and this may be quite limiting in terms of reflecting who you are and what you can give to it as an asset.
- During the process of writing a scholarship essay, always keep a question in mind, “Did I answer the question completely and correctly’? There is nothing worse than writing an essay off topic or covering something besides the assigned question. Scholarship essays usually have rigid limits (around 500 words), so if you try to speak of something besides the topic, you’ll surely cover it only superficially, which is not good for the quality.
- Make sure to show that you understood the question and keep to it, which may be achieved by including the rephrased question directly into the text. For instance, if your assignment asks you to compose an essay about a life-changing experience, you may start it (or at least start some sentence in the introductory paragraph) with the words, “my life-changing experience was…”
- Be personal but not too much. A scholarship essay should definitely include some portion of you and your personal ideas, experiences, and reflections; otherwise, the committee will not see a personality behind you. However, being too personal may make the writing inappropriate for the open audience and may push the committee away from you, so keep to the golden middle and you will be noticed.
Be Creative
Can you imagine how many scholarship essays the committee reads within one year? And what about a dozen years? They are surely sick and tired of dull, classical essays about how good you are and how strong your desire to study at the educational establishment is. Such essays may hardly win you a scholarship, no matter how good a person you are. So, get ready to be creative in this essay – it is your winning ticket to free education, after all, and you need to do your best to make it perfect! Here are some tips for adding a creative touch to a seemingly obvious and usual topic:
- Pick some funny story from your past. Make sure not just to make the committee laugh, but connect it to the essay’s question. The success of such an essay will depend on how well you can draw links between the two.
- Speak about some great person – a celebrity, politician, or simply a person who influenced your life strongly. However, do this from an unexpected angle; find something nobody knows about the person, or some non-obvious fact from his/her life that many people may tend to neglect. In such a way, you will reveal your insightfulness and an ability to see unobvious things hidden from the surface – a critical thinking talent may be appreciated by the committee.
- Treat your essay as a meal; spice it and make it delicious, serve it with grace and elegance. If you deliver information in a catchy yet correct language, with a properly designed plot and an involving structure, the committee will definitely read it to an end, and will see the writing talent standing behind your short writing piece.
Some Technical Tips to Make the Essay Good-Looking
Besides the catchy and authentic content that may win you a scholarship and make you noticed by the committee, you should never forget about technical correctness of the essay as well. We’re not talking about typos or grammar errors here – even one mistake is a guaranteed killer of the committee’s impression! We’re rather considering some technical arrangements and language choice to make the essay in compliance with all academic writing standards. Some things to consider here are:
- Unless it is specifically stipulated, try to avoid the use of first-person narrative. It is rarely welcome in the academic writing field, so its use may be considered inappropriate by the committee. Use it only in cases when the scholarship essay assignment asks you to write from the first person and tell about something personal – that’s the only situation in which its use may be justified.
- Pay special attention to your structure and organization. An essay should be clear and readable; it should have all necessary essay components. Don’t let your thoughts wonder and avoid speaking about random things in an essay – coherence and a logical flow of information are usually exactly what the reviewers are looking for.
- It is useful to use some references in the text of your scholarship essay to back up the argument and show that you conducted some research in the field. Make sure you cite only credible sources written by authoritative authors. Otherwise, your sources may not aid the creation of a proper impression, but will only spoil it.
- Keep the rules of the establishment to which you apply for the scholarship in mind at every stage of the writing process. If the committee requires not using a title page, then you should not have it. If they state that a phone number AND an e-mail are required, then don’t include only one contact. Neglect of instructions and rules suggests that you read them carelessly, and generally characterizes you as a light-minded person. Thus, needless to say, your chances to get a scholarship vanish.
These are the basic rules of applying for a scholarship, and in case you wish to study free of charge or at least save a considerable sum of money on the tuition, then a scholarship essay is a decisive work for you to complete. Generally, it is not recommended to use one essay for numerous applications, but if the task is similar, you may recycle your essay a bit and use its content, that is, your personal story, for several applications. However, do not over-use this option, as it is a risk of making the paper too generic.