Scholarship
Essay
Writing the Application Essay
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Do You Qualify for a Scholarship?
Are you looking
for a way to afford the higher education needed to thrive in today's ultra
competitive environment?
Nearly everyone is eligible, we’ve discovered, for
some sort of scholarship assistance. Below we have highlighted a few of the most
popular programs. Additional scholarships opportunities are listed in the left
navigation of this page, and we also recently began offering a few of our own
scholarships.
Minority Scholarships
Hispanics and
African Americans comprise the largest groups of minority students challenged,
at best, when it comes to educational advantage. Many are still considered lower
income.
Unless they are given a chance at scholarships, many minorities will
never attend college, once again leaving large numbers of Americans
undereducated. There are many minority scholarships available for a
smorgasbord of minority groups, including the disabled, Native Americans, women,
and GLBT students.
Native Americans
Native American
students are often considered alongside other minority students, but there are
also special interest groups, even Federal grants and scholarships available for
Native Americans
The American Indian College Fund is just one of
dozens of scholarship funds specially designed to fiscally support tribal
colleges in the United States. Tribal colleges and universities also make it
possible to educate as many Native Americans as is possible by extending
valuable monies and grants.
Writing the Application Essay
Scholarship essay:
One of
the Most Important Steps to Getting into College
The feared
essay! If you thought the essay part of the SAT was a nightmare, then you
might want to review spelling, basic grammar, punctuation, and basic sentence
structure.
Brand Yourself
Everyone is capable of filling in the
blanks on a college application, but not everyone can apply their wits and
creativity to writing the typically required essay.
Above the hard facts on
your application, the essay is where you actually are lucky enough to have the
opportunity to brand yourself.
Make yourself individual.
This does not
mean you can go overboard with absurdity, or egotistically fluff yourself to the
point of caricature, but it means that with a good topic, well organized
thoughts, and actual writing, that you can show your smarts, innovation,
creativity and thought process all rolled into one piece.
Be
Original
Imagine, if you had to read thousands of applicant essays,
what types of topics would stand out to you?
Try discovering an essay topic
in that way. Allow your “voice” to show through. When you struggle to make the
essay formal and stiff, it will lose its appeal very quickly. You want to hook
the admissions person who is reviewing yours, out of a pile of others.
Some
colleges will generously let you choose a topic, which is a predicament in and
of itself; so make sure to take a look at our Selecting an Essay Topic page .
Other schools, especially organizations administering grants, might assign a
topic. There are advantages to both.
Scholarship essay: Proofreading,
Rewriting, and Editing
A good piece of writing doesn’t come
easily. Well-written prose is hard work. Maintain a consistent focus in your
piece. Offer enough details so that the reader is very clear what the
experience, idea, or event has meant to you and what your role has
been.
Rewrite and rewrite again. Often where you first started writing the
essay is not the real beginning, sometimes it’s a few sentences down or even a
paragraph down, where you started to let your thoughts really flow. Don’t be
afraid to cut out the original beginning in favor of a stronger essay.
Spelling mistakes, bad sentence structure, and garbled points of view will
stick out. Use spell-check. Refer to a reputable style guide, such as the MLA
Style Manual or the Chicago Manual of Style, two very widely accepted
sources.
Plagiarism
Somewhere along the way some students
have gotten the idea that “borrowing” or “copying” someone else’s work,
especially off the internet, is an acceptable practice. A lot of people do it,
and online content is plagiarized everyday, often ending up in dozens of
different places.
There is no better and quicker way to getting yourself
rejected from any college application process. You will be discovered. If it has
been used without permission or improperly cited, it is plagiarism.
Some
colleges pay custom search companies to look for plagiarism. One common academic
bot is TurnItInBot. To see how easy it is to compare your writing to other
content give Copyscape a try.
Paid
Services
There are plenty of paid services that will promise you an
“original” essay for $10. Colleges want to see your work, not the work of
someone else. Professional editing services alone will cost over $10, so you can
guarantee that whatever is being sold for $10 will be unoriginal and/or junk
that is worth far less than the paper it is printed on.
Professional editing
services might be a value, especially when you are applying for competitive
graduate school programs and feel your weakest spot is writing. Keep in mind
that many of the more substantive services can be quite costly.
Women
Women, including minorities, will
discover nearly endless sources of women scholarship funds.
The fields
of Mathematics, Engineering, or the Sciences have been scarcely populated with
women professionals. Recently, more and more organizations and educational
institutions are supporting the efforts of women in these interests. Many
organizations focus on supporting the efforts of women returning to academia;
some return to study for doctorates and other advanced degrees, often in
mid-career or after raising a family.
Athletics
Perhaps some of
the more well known scholarship programs, and certainly highly advertised and
promoted, have been those aimed at student athletes . Only a minute proportion
of good college athletes even qualify to apply for the big athletic scholarships
with all the largest universities, but there are untold amounts of grant and
scholarship money available to other athletes willing to flesh out the small to
medium-sized college teams. Many smaller colleges focus on attracting good
athletes with solid academic records who balance their reputations in both
areas. Most regularly extend grant or scholarship money that achieves those
goals.
Fortune 500
We offer a list of Fortune 500
Scholarships . Corporations the likes of Microsoft make it a part of their
business model to extend scholarship money to gifted students from all
backgrounds. Often, grants require the student to study in a related field. This
list is the best of the best in available funds from the biggest corporations in
the country
