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.