Scholarship Screwup #9: Bore Me With Irrelevant Stuff

by Josh Barsch - http://www.givemescholarships.com/2009/07/26/scholarship-screwup-9-bore-me-with-irrelevant-crap/

I know, I know – that’s an abrasive way of putting it for those of you who are easily wounded. In other words, then, do yourself a favor: exclude any unnecessary information that has nothing to do with your essay. Everything in your essay should be relevant to the topic at hand.
This is us after we read most scholarship essays.

This is us after we read most scholarship essays.

We receive bad examples of staying on topic every day. They’re the essays that start like this: “My name is Jane Doe, and I was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania on My mother is a dental hygienist and my father is a mortgage broker, and I have two brothers and two sisters. I attend Kennedy High School, where I am a senior.”

Unless you’re somehow going to tie that information into some critically important part of your essay, the committee doesn’t care a lick about any of it; instead, it sounds suspiciously like you’re trying to fill up space on the page and nothing more.

Unless you’re bringing up things like your birthplace, parents and siblings in order to shed light on your unique upbringing – let’s say, you were born to crack-addicted parents in Miami who dropped you off in the Everglades as a newborn, but a family of alligators took you in and raised you as one of their own, and that’s the reason you’ve been captain of the varsity swim team since age 11 – then info like this is a waste of space and a waste of the committee’s time. We call it “commodity information.” Everyone has a birth date, a school and a hometown, and unless yours have some sort of special significance, leave them out of your essay.