Scholarship Screwup #3: Cry Me a River

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

Hardships: We all have them, right? If you read as many scholarship applications as I do, you’d certainly think so. With college costs spiraling upward every year and families pinched for cash to pay for it all, students are going all-out to make sure the committees understand how rough they have it.  But the truth is, we don’t all have hardships. We’re all busy, we all have pesky annoyances and long to-do lists, that’s for sure. But we don’t all have true hardships. Let me clarify the difference:

Zip it, kid.

* If your parents were killed when you were a baby and you were raised in an orphanage, that’s a unique hardship. If you were raised in Suburbia and had to share your 2,600 square-foot house with three wild and crazy brothers, that’s not.

* If you had to get a job at age 8 to help your family pay rent, that’s a hardship. If you had to get a job at 16 to pay for your first car, that’s not.

* If you were hit by a BMW and finished your senior year telecommuting from the intensive care unit, that’s a hardship. If you had to take a part-time job at the hospital to fix the body damage you did to your BMW by hitting that other person, that’s not.

Making sense yet? If you mention a hardship in your scholarship application, be sure it’s really a hardship. One thing you’ve got to remember when you’re applying for scholarships is that scholarship committees receive thousands of essays every week from students with thousands of different backgrounds, many of whom come from Third World countries in Africa and Asia. Some have led extremely difficult lives and have overcome obstacles so outlandish that Americans can’t even comprehend them. These are the type of stories that scholarship judges are accustomed to reading. By comparison, American student essays sound a little, well, spoiled and whiny. Here are a couple of examples of people with actual hardships vs. people who are just very busy:

Britney from Eden Prairie: “After running 3-5 miles every night at track practice, sometimes my body is so exhausted when I go home that I can barely finish my homework without falling asleep at my desk.”
Belanor from Central America: “After running seven miles to get to school in the morning, I am so exhausted that I can barely stay awake. If we had desks, I would fall asleep in mine, but we don’t; we study on the cold dirt floor.”

Molly from Oak Park: “As a senior, of course, I have an extremely hectic schedule. Of course I’m in school all day Monday through Friday, but on Tuesday and Thursday nights I have advanced piano lessons for 90 minutes as soon as I get home from school, on Wednesdays I have church group and I work the breakfast shift at Burger King on Saturdays and Sundays. I endure this difficult life because I know that it will pay off in the end.”

Mbutu from Zambia: “On Tuesdays, I walk 12 miles to the refugee camp at sunrise to receive our large bag of rice and flour from the U.N. so that my village can eat. Because the bag weighs 45 pounds, it takes all day and night Wednesday to return home with the bag. On Thursday, I pass out from exhaustion while my neighbors begin to cook flatbread for the children…” And so on.

If it sounds like I’m making light of other people’s misery, I’m not. These are pretty much spot-on descriptions of some of the essays I’ve read. So if you haven’t had to overcome insurmountable odds, that’s fine — that’s the case for most of us lucky enough to be born in the in the United States, at least. But don’t go overboard trying to convince the committee that your life is truly difficult if, in fact, it’s really only busy.

Now, a point of clarification: This doesn’t mean that just because you weren’t orphaned by Sudanese warlords at age 9 that you can’t win a scholarship by talking about any challenges you’ve met. You can and should talk about those challenges. Judges love to hear about challenges overcome. Just keep your perspective and resist the urge to call these challenges “hardships” or something similarly melodramatic, because trust me — we’ve read about every imaginable type of hardship, and we know and appreciate the definition of the word.

Scholarship Screwup #4: Give Us Some Vague, Self-Absorbed Plans for Your Future

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


A rule of thumb in scholarship essays (and life, if you will) is that it’s better to be specific than to be vague. Society is accustomed to using vague labels for people and what they do: student, businessman, housewife, factory worker, etc. These labels are convenient for the normal “small-talk” conversations that fill our daily lives.

Nothings wrong with wanting tons of money. You may want to tell the committee something different, though.

But your scholarship committee is a different audience. We want to know what’s different about you, and how you stand out from the millions of other people in this country alone who call themselves “students.” Even among those who have specific plans for their lives, there are big differences, and in a scholarship competition, it’s up to you to give the judges details about what you actually plan to be doing in the future, rather than just dropping a label on yourself. Let’s consider the example of students who aspire to be doctors.

If you tell the scholarship committee that you want to be a doctor, that sounds pretty good. If you say that you want to be a doctor who performs research that leads to new drugs to reduce the effects of Alzheimer’s, or that you want to work to improve dental health among inner-city children, or open a practice in the country in order to improve elderly care in under-served rural areas — that sounds exceptional.

The more specific you are, the more your essay is going to resonate with the committee, and it’s not hard to see why. Saying you want to be a doctor is nice, but it just doesn’t mean a lot unless you say why you want to be a doctor and what you’ll be doing once you’re in that career.

And now, on to the second part: It’s a good idea to talk about your future plans in terms of how you’ll be helping others. If you plan on becoming a teacher or a nurse or another job that’s strongly associated with community service, then this will be pretty easy; however, your future plans don’t have to be 100% charity work in order to do this effectively. Well-compensated professionals of all types are responsible for helping people in countless ways.

Of course, there’s an elephant in the room here that we need to acknowledge. For a great many people, the biggest (and sometimes only) reason for working toward a certain profession is the fat salary it promises. Many doctors and lawyers care less about helping people than having a Benz in the garage and a vacation house on the beach. In that case, I say — more power to you, and I hope you get it all! (If you do, please remember little old me who helped you get there). But when it’s time to write about your career aspirations on your scholarship application, then you should lie.

Lie? Yes, lie. Remember again — this is not a book about morals and ethics. It’s a book about how to win. And in this case, honesty is not the best policy.

What’s wrong with expressing a desire to make a good honest buck? I mean, isn’t the desire to get rich at least part of the legendary American Dream? Yes indeed — I’m right there with you (hey, I don’t give the book away for free, do I?). But let’s have a practical moment here: Who’s reading these scholarship essays and deciding whether you should win?

You guessed it — mostly teachers and other education professionals. And as you know, teachers don’t exactly make boatloads of money. They gave up any dreams of big paychecks when they chose a more service-oriented, feel-good job. So a lust for money and material possessions is not going to resonate terribly well with these people.

Remember: Scholarship judges are normal people, and it’s normal to gravitate toward people whose interests are similar to your own. Therefore, we can assume that teachers will tend to empathize with students for whom wealth is secondary to service. If that doesn’t describe you, then do your best acting job, at least until you’re done with your application.
Until next time, good luck!

Scholarship Screwup #5: Ignore the World Outside High School

Ignore the World Outside High School
by Josh Barsch - http://www.givemescholarships.com

The average scholarship applicant lists a truckload of school-sanctioned activities in which he/she has participated over the four years of high school. Sports teams, clubs, projects, competitions, etc. This can only be a good thing, right? After all, that’s what your parents and counselors have been telling you all along — the more stuff you participate in, clubs you join, activities you do, etc., the more well-rounded student you appear to be. And that’s all true, but it’s not the end of the story.

These people are trapped in high school. You are not.

Frankly, school-related activities on their own just aren’t enough to grab a scholarship committee’s attention anymore. In addition to these common activities, you’ve got to go beyond the high school stuff if you want to grab the big scholarship bucks. Here’s why: The Internet has opened scholarship opportunities up to thousands of applicants who wouldn’t have been competing with you for this scholarship 10 years ago. And that means the less unique your essay is, the more likely it is that you’ll be passed over for the scholarship.
And about 99% of the application essays that students are writing these days talk about nothing but common high-school stuff: sports teams, clubs, groups — basically, I’m talking about any group they take a picture of for the yearbook. If there’s nothing but “high school stuff” in your essay, it’ll just be part of one big blur to the scholarship committee, and it’ll end up in the trash. They see literally hundreds of essays come in with that same stuff in them every single day. Not even a scroll of AP classes and high SAT scores are going to set you significantly apart from your competitors.

So does that mean you’re a loser, you and your four years of science club, soccer team, dance team, school play and varsity band? Of course not — that’s all great stuff and you should be glad you did it. But on its own, it’s not going to win you much scholarship money. The cold reality of the Internet age is that you’ve got to go beyond the ordinary to win big money — and, sadly, four years chock full of school activities is now considered ordinary.
 

Publish Post

You’ll have to dig for something deeper, better, more unique.
 

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.

 

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.

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.

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.

Top 10 Scholarship Screwup's

Scholarship Screwup #10: Act Like You’ll Starve If You Don’t Win
from - www.givemescholarships.com

Judges know that you would very much like to receive the scholarships that you apply for. It’s natural for you to have some emotional stock in whether you win or not. College costs are serious business, and every dime you can get someone else to pick up for you, the better.

Creatively making ends meet is what it's all about.
But in hundreds of applications over the years, we’ve seen applicants taking this to extreme levels. Time after time, students write that if they don’t receive this very scholarship, they probably won’t be able to attend college. Or they won’t be able to pay the rent, or they’ll be kicked out into the streets (I’m not exaggerating here).

Now I admit that one of my purposes in creating the Give Me Scholarships site and writing the book is to help you manipulate the scholarship judges and, where appropriate, play on their emotions to your advantage. But remember, it’s a fine line. You must be careful about how hard to try to tug on the judges’ heartstrings. There are a couple of reasons why laying on the desperation in a scholarship essay is a bad idea:

1) It puts undue and unwelcome pressure on the scholarship committee. Judges are human, and no one wants to feel like the person who flushed a kid’s educational dreams down the toilet, or worse yet, got you tossed out of your apartment and onto the streets. Committee members have a heart, but they also have a job to do, and that’s to select the most qualified applicant. By suggesting that you won’t make it without them, you put them in a bind. How? Well, you’re not the only one doing it! There are a dozen stories a week just like these. And when there’s one scholarship to give and 12 people (this week) who say they can’t make ends meet without the award, then it’s a lot easier for the committee to trash all 12 and get back to its job of selecting the most qualified applicant.

2)From a more practical standpoint, you should never depend on receiving any one scholarship. The odds are always stacked against you (although less so now that you’re reading these emails), and placing your hopes on one award is like putting all your money on one roulette number. Always have a backup plan. Always investigate all your student loan options, grants, jobs, etc. Even someone with all the inside info in the Superpack shouldn’t bank on receiving scholarships if at all possible. Develop your educational plan first, including costs and how to pay for them; then, as you receive scholarships, start erasing sources of funds like loans and jobs as they’re no longer needed.

For Scholarship Screwup #9 Check back next week!