Scholarship essay is one of such types of academic writing that hardly have any recurrent pattern that may be used to enumerate the exemplary plan or set of things to be present in it. They differ greatly according to the scholarship they refer to and people who apply for these scholarships.
There are, however, a number of good tips based on years of studying works of this kind we may mention here:
- First of all, don’t recite all the things the scholarship committee may learn from your credentials. Believe us, they are not that interested in you to read all this twice.
- Take your extracurricular activities into account, for they can tell the committee a great lot about you. Try to find correlations between them and your career choice, mention how they led you to this decision.
- Consider your most important accomplishments – not necessarily of academic kind, just anything that presents you as a talented person, who is the best candidate for this scholarship.
- Get some information about the organization behind the scholarship. It may tell you a lot about what the committee is likely to be impressed with.
It may be a good idea to follow these expectations; try, for example, learning something about the person, in whose honor the scholarship has been founded, and draw parallels between your own characteristics and those of this person. The important thing here, however, is not to go too far, or it may seem ridiculous.
Scholarship essay is first of all about the originality and uniqueness of the person in question, so it is impossible to give any outline of a typical essay – if it is typical, it is already wrong. But some things should distinguish this type of writing:
- An account of personal experience. The best way to tell the committee about you is to describe a particular situations showing certain qualities.
- Make your writing livelier by replacing adjectives and adverbs by nouns and verbs (e.g., “to chatter” instead of “to talk quickly”). The less words there are, the better.
- Be truthful. You needn’t tell everything, but don’t falsify information.
- Don’t exceed the word limit.
- Scholarship essay writing should take time. Start as early as possible, reread and rewrite it as many times as it requires to make it perfect.
Concentrate on your own personality, your aspirations and positive traits, don’t try to imitate somebody – and you’ll succeed!
