scholarship essay titles

scholarship essay titles

How to Write an Outstanding Scholarship Essay

1. Introduction

Step One: Understanding the Essay When starting down this long and treacherous road to scholarship money, it is very important to understand the specific requirements for every application. The reason for attaining the scholarship might have a profound effect of what the essay is about. In other words, the scholarship might be to young entrepreneurs, or for students who have shown a profound interest in community service. This is where understanding a target audience is important. A student may not actually understand it, but what this means is that the student must put their shoes into the person’s receiving the scholarship’s shoes. What would that person like to read? What has that person done to be recognized? These are crucial questions that must be answered within the essay. Answering these questions will give a student a framework to write the essay in terms of a specific event. Years of community service would best be written about with a cause and effect form essay, while an essay written because of a specific entrepreneurial event might best be written in a chronological manner.

The race to obtain scholarships can be fierce, and a well-written essay can place an applicant ahead of the competition. While each scholarship application will have its own unique requirements, understanding the basics can help with the process. A scholarship essay is constructive: analysis, interpretation, and questioning need not be critical of a person, piece of work, or philosophy, but may be. The essay should build on the applicant’s personal perspective, and are potentially persuasive, values based, argumentative, or cause and effect. Scholarship applications often require an essay, too. Usually this essay must be well-written, insightful, and “personal”. A nice essay can sometimes swing any decision into the applicant’s favor.

2. Understanding the Scholarship Essay Prompt

Scholarship applications often require writing a scholarship essay with an outlined prompt. In this section, we’ll be covering the following areas of understanding the essay’s prompt. This includes understanding the most important aspect of the essay, gathering information into one unit, and looking for areas of possible change. Understanding what the essay question is and getting a good idea of the most important or underlying information that needs to be known in the essay is the defining area of comprehension. The best way to do this is by reading the prompt a few times or slowly. This will help to break the question down and see the direction of what is expected of the essay. It’s always important to stick to the question of the essay and not wander off-topic. Wandering off-topic will make the essay become unclear or irrelevant to the initial question and will give off the wrong impression to a reader, possibly resulting in a lost chance of acquiring the scholarship. If the essay prompt has become difficult to understand, ask someone else to read the prompt and explain what they think the question is and what should be concluded in the essay. This is a good way to determine if the essay will be understood by others reading it.

3. Crafting a Compelling Personal Statement

The content you include in your personal statement helps the reader to make a judgement about you. Your personal statement tells the reader what your professional interests are, what you intend to specialize in, how your previous experiences have provided you with the skills you need to succeed in your specialty, and your commitment to the specialty. First impressions are important, so take time to develop a clear content that reflects who you are. Start your personal statement with an attention-grabbing lead – an anecdote, quote or piece of information that conveys why you have chosen this specialty. Ensure the lead has a clear connection to the rest of the statement. This will help your statement flow naturally. Don’t waste words explaining why the specialty is important. The reader will assume that if you are applying to the specialty it is something you value. Instead, use the precious character space to set the scene for the next few paragraphs. Give the reader an understanding of the context in which you developed your commitment to the specialty. This may involve describing an influential or life-changing event. Be sure to explain how the experience was relevant to your specialty. Make it easy for the reader to follow your thoughts by defining specialty words and including only the most important examples.

4. Highlighting Achievements and Goals

When it comes to writing a great scholarship essay, I suggest to “dig into your background.” This is one of the best things you can do to prepare for your essay since it’s probably the most important step and will help you produce a great piece of work. What you should do is sit down with a piece of paper and a pen, and write down a few key memories from your past. It might help to just lightly close your eyes and think back. Write down various things from each stage of your life. Starting at your younger years, you should ask your parents what you were like because our memories from before high school are often quite hazy. You should write down what you were interested in, what you took from school both academically and extracurricular, your friends, and relationships with people in and out of school. Then, move onto your high school years and do the same thing. Then, once you have a few memories from each stage of your life, it should be quite clear which one is the most significant. You should then try to narrow it down to the most specific happening within that stage. For that particular memory, you should ask yourself “Why?” and “How did this event affect me?” This will be quite a helpful tool for generating evidence once you are in the writing process of your essay.

5. Concluding with Impact

Next, you need to transition into actually proving your thesis as it relates to your goals. This should take up about 85% of the conclusion. Basically, you need to take everything you said in your paper a step further. If your essay was to argue that Hamlet was mad, your thesis was that his madness, while feigned, was true to his current motives and feelings. You would want to expand on that and show the reader how Hamlet’s actions and speech indicate that his madness was, in fact, true at certain points. Use specific examples to clearly demonstrate your thesis. At this point, the reader may have forgotten what your goals were, and this part of the conclusion will serve as a reminder, enabling the reader to understand your thesis in terms of your original intentions. This will give the reader a sense of intellectual accomplishment in recognizing the truth of your argument. This is the most powerful part of your conclusion, so make your thesis fresh in your mind.

First and foremost, your conclusion should leave the reader with a feeling of completeness. Make sure to go back and read over your introduction as a means of reinforcing what you said there. Then, transition into a restatement of your goals in the form of a concrete, provable statement. Tell the reader that you have accomplished what you set out to accomplish. This part of your conclusion should only occupy about 10% of the overall conclusion. You are now 90% finished with your conclusion.

Writing at this stage, when you are so close to finishing, is the most passionate of all. When done well, it can have a powerful effect on the reader. A good conclusion will leave a lasting impression in the reader’s mind.