Scholarship Screwup #6: Forget About Family

by Josh Barsch- http://www.givemescholarships.com

Yesterday I wrote about how school activities alone weren’t enough to win you scholarships, and that sent some of you into a panic. Seems many readers have been banking quite heavily on those school activities to win you some money. Not to worry: Today and tomorrow, we’re addressing how to beef up those applications and cash in on the mistakes of the other 99% of your classmates. You don’t have to cure cancer or stop global warming to win a scholarship — you just need to have a little more information than your classmates. And thanks to these emails, you’re going to have a LOT more. Here are two tips that will kick your scholarship applications into high gear and leave your friends in the dust (sorry, friends, but it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there).

Blood is thicker than water. Capisce?

Don’t forget your family. I know that we on the scholarship committees miss some incredible stories every day when our applicants write scholarship essays and mention absolutely nothing about the role they play in their own families. Let me say this clearly: your role in your own family is not as important as your school activities – it’s MORE important. Hey, let’s be honest: School will be over in a few years, but your family is around forever. Members of the cheerleading squad or the football team or the science club will forget your name in 10 years (trust me, it’s true — I’ve been to class reunions), but your family never will.

Probably the biggest crying shame in the entire world of scholarships is that, for years, thousands of excellent students have been passed over for scholarships. They are the students who have had no time to participate in extracurricular activities because they had to care for their families or work paying jobs to do so. Worse yet, those students are made to feel like they shouldn’t even apply, because they’re not “active” enough.
That’s the biggest and most unfair load of garbage I’ve ever heard, and don’t let anyone sell it to you. If you’re so busy with family responsibilities that you can’t involve yourself in student organizations, then you may just have a stronger application than those who do. But remember: We can’t give you credit for your family responsibilities if you don’t tell us what they are! So by all means, if it’s applicable to you, go into detail about how you spend time doing things for your family.

In the particular case of our company’s scholarships, we’ve always given heavy weight to “work ethic,” and that’s as applicable to those who work hard in their homes and at paying jobs as it is to those who work hard on the varsity field or inside the school walls. Our unwavering advice for scholarship essays is this: Tell your story, regardless of where it takes place.

 

This Week My Life...

Get Excited for the first VIDEO BLOG!!!!!





So, There has been a lot going on this week and I'm not really sure how to put it into words. I have been swamped with homework from my documentary film class, Having to write a treatment (basically a short story for a documentary that I want to do), Then trying to understand and keep up with Sociology, Then having to go up to Mt. Hood and follow the Natural Resource crew around and get some footage of them for their promo and short documentary, Then working on the film festival, plus all my independent work such as Silk Espresso projects, Working on a missions Video for Travis and Alexis and polishing up some videos that I did last term...as you can see i've been busy.
It was hard for me to find time for this blog because it was my girlfriends birthday this week and We went out to dinner at Pastali's which is a phenomenal place to eat, then we went and saw two movies. We saw "The Joneses" and "The Ghost Writer" These were both really good movies and If you like Independent movies, Go check those out.
Well, I'm not going to write too much more because i'm a little tired honestly and who are we kidding...You probably didn't make it this far...and if you did, I thank you and bid you farewell, thanks for dropping by.
-Nathanael Sams

Scholarship Screwup #7: Give No Details

by Josh Barsch- http://www.givemescholarships.com

Over the past two days, I’ve written about how school activities alone aren’t enough to win you scholarships, and that worried some of you quite a bit. Fear not, friends: today we’re continuing yesterday’s discussion of how to beef up those applications and cash in on the mistakes of your classmates. Here’s a huge but simple tip:

Brevity is good. Withholding key details is bad.

Talk about what you’ve actually done – not just the groups you’ve joined. Sure, you were in your church’s youth group. And you can put “Four years in my church youth group” in your application if you want. But if you do that, you’re not telling me much. Since I haven’t been to your church, I don’t know what your church’s youth group does. For all I know, you could be building full-scale models of Noah’s Ark and doing research at the Dead Sea, or you could all be taking a one-hour nap every Sunday. I have no idea. You have to tell me.

Set yourself apart, then, by talking about what you did over that time. Let’s say you spend four years in your church youth group serving meals to the homeless one day a week in a soup kitchen. Maybe you served an average of 150 people on each of those days in the soup kitchen (it’s OK to give an honest estimate — you’re not expected to be exact on matters like this). There are 208 weeks in four years, and that means you served 31,200 meals to homeless people during high school.

Now that’s impressive. But I’d have never known about it if all you put on your scholarship application was “Spent 4 years in church youth group,” now would I? If you want us to know you’re industrious, you have to tell us what you’ve done. That makes the difference between a boring, commodity essay and one that makes the committee’s eyes pop.

Organizing

So, I'm sure you've heard of our moving into a smaller, more uncomfortable cubicle.  It's been interesting this past week to be working right across from our supervisors, Pros - I can easily ask them questions, Cons= it's harder to get away with stuff.  Just kidding, but all kidding aside, I have some pictures for you.  You see, part of our move required us to find a new place to store all of our brochures in a different place....well there are thousands!  Here's what we should have done, We should have put a label on them when we were moving, that would have made life so much easier.  But we didn't, so it is my tast to begin organizing these things.  I started yesterday and as you can see in the photos, It was not a very big container and yet there were so many different kinds of brochures.  It was a little daunting.  Also in the photos I put some pictures of the shelves...you see all those boxes...yeah, those are all full of brochures...NOT COOL PEOPLE!

Other than that things are good.  Well, this term is going to be super busy and i'm not sure i'm ready for that, I'm graduating, I'm on the soar team, I'm taking 17 credit hours which is including a Sociology class where I don't know what the Hell I'm doing.  It's a little rough.  I am excited though because our production class is working on a video for Mt. Hood and I get to do all the music, I wish I could figure out how to put an audio sample on here so you could hear it and tell me what you think.  Oh well, I'm excited for that though...

Maybe I should come up with a witty catch phrase for my blog...like "Nathanael Sams, Someone Of Excellence"  Or "THE NEVER ENDING STORY"  That's actually the name of my other blog at nathanaelsams.blogspot.com  However, I haven't made any blogs up there...Don't worry I will.

Well, Enjoy my photos, I know that I did, and just be thankful it's not you...it's me.

-Nathanael Sams

everyone has a plan...

PLAN:
–noun
1.a scheme or method of acting, doing, proceeding, making, etc., developed in advance: battle plans.
–verb (used without object)
1.to make plans: to plan ahead; to plan for one's retirement.

my definiton:
- A CRUTCH ONE USES TO AVOID ENJOYING THE MOMENT AN A FEEBLE ATTEMPT TO CONTROL ONES FUTURE -

what is it with people?!?! In the past week I've been asked MULTIPLE TIMES about my "plans for after graduation"... "umm.. to live my life and have fun doing it..." If i answer their question this way 9 times outta 10 i get a look of "well thats a terrible plan". the other 1 person laughs it off as though ive just told them a fantastic joke! wow! I would hate to give my life a set of guidelines and demands that i have very little control over! ITS NOT A WONDER THAT PEOPLE HAVE MID-LIFE CRISIS' OR THAT PEOPLE COMMIT SUICIDE! an to think the majority of the people i pass in the hallways here at MHCC at some point in their lives will look back on what theyve done and then judge themselves all based on "how well they followed the PLAN" its really sad and very ironic.
here's another thing i have to say, sure i went to school for video production but thats not the only thing im skilled in. God loved me enough to give me the happiness an skills to try new things and not be afraid of change. so what if i dont end up in production. but i can tell you this: whatever i do im going to be happy surrounded by people i love and a vast contentment with myself.
Thank you big JC...

Scholarship Screwup #8: Preach To Me

by Josh Barsch http://www.givemescholarships.com

Scholarship essays are certainly about self-expression, and lots of applications ask open-ended questions about how you, the forward-thinking leader of tomorrow, might solve today’s problems. That gives you full license to come out with your ideas on how to change things, and in so doing, you’ll probably find yourself pointing out the flaws of society — i.e., the things that need to be changed. But be careful about getting on a “high horse” and sounding too judgmental or preachy, or giving the impression that solutions to the world’s problems are obvious.


Leave the moralizing and proselytizing to the televangelists.
Let me point out why this is important. There are legions of intelligent young people out there, but maturity eludes many of them. Intelligence is cheap. Maturity is priceless. If I had to choose a single most important quality in scholarship winners, it would be maturity. Show maturity in your essays and you’ll be much more likely to bring home a check.

Why is this? It’s because you’re headed into a make-or-break stage of your life when you hit college. The things you do there — even seemingly small things — will have an immense, life-altering effect on your future. And it’s maturity, not raw intelligence, that is your key to handling those situations successfully. You may be a wizard at literature or science or economics or whatever, but if you can’t handle the pressures of the world, you’re likely to flame out and not meet the goals you have for yourself right now.

As scholarship judges, we don’t want to give money to people who are going to flame out. We want to give money to the ones who are going to make it. Hence, we look for and place great value on maturity. Got it? OK.

So, how do we tell who’s mature and who’s not? Well, it’s an inexact science, to be sure. But one of the hallmarks of maturity in young people is their ability to balance their own big ideas with the knowledge that the world is complex, and that they still have a lot to learn. The world is a complex place, and solutions to society’s most difficult problems are hard to find. That doesn’t mean you can’t help solve them someday; it just means that, if we’re talking about a real problem, it’s not going to be easy to solve.

With that in mind, if you catch yourself writing overly simplistic phrases such as, “If more people would just…” or “The world would be a better place if we would just wake up and realize,” remember that the problems you’re talking about probably don’t have solutions as simple as you think. I’m not positive, but few major problems have ever been solved by a collective bunch of folks all spontaneously “waking up and realizing” anything. Your scholarship judges are educated and know this all too well. Preachy proposals will likely lead to some eye-rolling when your essay is being read, and that’s not good for you.