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!