how to start scholarship essay

how to start scholarship essay

Tips for Writing a Winning Scholarship Essay

1. Introduction

After highlighting your past experiences, you need to link these to the future. To give a clear picture of your career, you will have to mention what you want to do next and why. Now what you can do is move directly to your career goal and explain to the reader how what you have done till now or an incident in the past has influenced you to take up this career. Now, if you are motivated enough to talk about the incident, then the reader would almost be following your story, and this is what gets an impression. So this part of linking your past to the present and making the reader follow your story is again an important factor in getting an impression. Now go back to the incident and explain more about the kind of influence it had on your life and how it really develops your interest to take that task as a career. Now here, make sure your career goals are defined and are linked to your scholarship. If the introduction was about your own career, you can link it to the scholarship. If the introduction was about the incident, then roll it down by explaining how you have succeeded through the years and how these experiences have developed into leadership or managerial skills.

Also, make sure you tell them how the experience has inspired you or how you have applied it in your life, mentioning specific examples. All these things should somehow relate to your educational or career goals, and this is the main reason for telling about all these. Remember, it’s not just the incident, but how you learned from it or how you have applied it into your life is what really matters. Make sure the impact of that incident is well described and explained because a reader is moved by a story only if it is very well understandable. So remember to link your what and why to the how. This could be the most important part of your introduction because this creates the impression of your character in the reader’s mind, and this impression needs to be impressive.

Your basic goal is to bring enough power into the introduction to make committee members read the whole essay with interest and attention. There are numerous ways you can do it with ease, and I will share some of the tactics that have worked for me. Consider opening with a relevant quotation to establish the tone of your essay, but make sure that the quotation is really relevant. Define a specific event, a strong statement style, or make it personal to state. Then you can roll down the introduction with the places you have traveled to, interesting experiences, etc.

2. Research and Understand the Scholarship

Research can be one of the most important things that you can do to ensure your scholarship. If you understand what the business offering the scholarship is searching for, you’ll be much more likely to be granted the scholarship or grant. Your research enables you to create an idea of action focused about the essay prompt, produce a thesis statement, and write a good essay. Try to collect some factual information regarding the business offering the scholarship. Who are the decision makers? What’s the mission statement? What do they consider an accomplishment? And try to recognize the real reason for the occurrence of the scholarship. Is it a manifestation of corporate social responsibility? Could it be the company’s effort to invest in the development of human resources? Whenever you can answer these questions, you should have greater clarity to generate your plan of action. With this information, you will be able to create a thesis statement that is exact, powerful, and focused. This may also help you to narrow your focus on the essay. After understanding your essay target, try to identify the traits that the business is looking for in an applicant. Now, these will become the topics for your essay. Keep in mind that your essay should be supported with examples and your personal experience. So before you write, brainstorm about which traits of yours are best shown when you are demonstrating to do these deeds. This preparation will be worth the effort because it will further decrease the distance between you and the scholarship, thus increasing your probability of success.

3. Craft a Compelling Introduction

Introduction should not be in a chronological format. It is basically a start to provide a glimpse of what they are about to go through the whole essay. It’s like the opening to the main event. To start with the introduction, you can use a specific event. After getting done with the general information of the event, you can directly link the event to the event with which the writer has its first interaction with the scholarship. This link will set a good relation of the event with a familiar event with the reader. Another way is to highlight a single quality of yours, be it any one. Explain the interaction of the quality in your life with specific events or incidents. The another approach could be a comparison of your aims and goals with the present competition of scholarship. Use of questions should be avoided in the introduction as far as possible. They leave the reader in a fix that what could be the answer to the question and can deviate his mind from reading rest of the essay. You can’t expect the person to be mature enough to keep in mind the question and search for the answer after completion of the essay. An introduction should not be too lengthy. In fact, the whole essay should not be more than 600-800 words. An introduction part can be of 100-150 words.

4. Highlight Your Achievements and Goals

Compare with the goals, what you need to do is explain your plan after you graduate later. It will be better if the goals are realistic and tied to something that you have done. Because this can imply that you are a person with a clear purpose in the future and really want to make something happen. Because this is what the committee wants, someone who has a clear purpose and plan to realize it. With it, the committee assumes that if you are given a scholarship, you will use it in the best way and you will achieve more than what the committee expects. Don’t make big goals and abstract, it will only make the committee think that you don’t have a clear plan. The important thing to remember is never to make any achievements or purposes for yourself because it will only make the committee think negatively. Always link all of your goals and achievements with the committee’s expectations. Because this is the simplest way to make the committee think that you are the right person to get the scholarship.

About what to write in the achievement, you should emphasize your strengths. But before that, you must know what the committee values the most. They are leadership, public service, and desire to help a specific population. Once you know what their preference is, then you can compare it with your strengths. If leadership is what the committee values the most, and you think you have that, then give an example from your experience that can show you are a good leader. The example can be from your organization or your project. Then explain also what you learned from that experience. It will be much better if you can translate your experience of leadership into a specific change that you made because with this, the committee can see that you are really a leader with action, not just a title. Just write the strength that you think the committee will give an assessment.

5. Conclusion and Call to Action

In the conclusion, you should do three things: A. Recap in two sentences the scholarship prompt and your response to it. B. Now you should write a brief 150-250 word summary of your essay. This is essentially your opportunity to state once again in detail why you think you deserve the scholarship. Summarize your strengths and how they would apply to the scholarship. Also, make sure you take the time to clearly explain how receiving this scholarship would fulfill both short-term and long-term goals. C. Finally, blend these two points into a call to action. You can do this by answering some of the following questions: a. What positive lessons did I learn from this? b. How can I continue to apply what I learned in other life situations? c. How did this help me grow as a person? d. What importance does this hold in my life now? e. How and why is this important to my future? f. How does this help me fulfill my educational, career, or life goals? g. What are my future aspirations regarding this topic? The information gathered from the answers to these questions can be smoothly transitioned into a personal and/or career goal statement. This should be the last sentence of your essay gaining the readers attention, making them think, believe, or understand something that they didn’t before. This can help you bring your essay to a close, in a powerful, logical, yet not too pushy manner.