How To Write a Scholarship Essay and WIN Money for College!

Pretty much any legitimate scholarship will require some form of a scholarship essay. This is something that we teach in the scholarship system, the importance of actually having the opportunity for your student to sell themselves. That is pretty much through their essay. So that said, it is extremely important that students understand how to write a strong scholarship essay because this is what it comes down to many times when it comes to the scholarship selection committee. Now if your student is applying for scholarships and they do not require a scholarship essay, I would beg to differ on whether or not it's legitimate. So this is where we really want to make sure that we are fine-tuning those skills on writing those scholarship essays. And in fact, in the scholarship system, I have tons of lessons even for students who hate writing on how to write a well-written scholarship essay. So in today's video, I want to share some of those tips and I that they can win scholarship dollars rather than just keep getting those no's. And hopefully, this will help pay for college so that your students graduate with as little debt as possible. Hey there, my name is Jocelyn Pearson, founder of the scholarship system, and this is what we do. We help families redefine paying for college so that they can build a strong financial future rather than one buried in debt. I got over six figures in scholarships and our families to date have gotten well over $10 million. So we have seen a lot of scholarship essays. Now just a quick note, this is focused on US citizens or residents, not international students. Let's go ahead and dive in. Now just again addressing whether or not all scholarships have essays. If it is a no essay or a quick scholarship or enter to win, these scholarships are not the ones we want to focus on. I have multiple videos and trainings on how to identify which scholarship to apply to. This is actually one of the most important steps because if a student is applying to ones that are scams, then there's no way of winning. So that said, we will link to Don't Get Scammed, How to Identify a Legitimate Scholarship, that's one of my YouTube videos, on the screen here as well as in the description. And then I also want to invite you to my free webinar. It's about an hour long. I cover everything you and your family need to know about scholarships, including how to build a legitimate list of scholarships. So if you want to join that, you can find the training somewhere here on the screen. The link is thescholarshipsystem.com slash freetraining. I will also link to that in the description. All right, so let's get into the essays. So writing a competitive scholarship essay, it's not as challenging as students may think. And the great thing about this is once we get a well-written essay, we can often reuse it over and over. So it's worth the time up front and it'll save us a lot of time down the road. Now one of the first tips I want to share is to read all of the instructions when it comes to writing a essay. This might sound obvious, but you'd be amazed at how many applications I've seen where students miss the boat on some specific detail in the instructions. They want to focus on the topic to cover, formatting requirements, due dates, word counts, any kind of sourcing requirements. So any kind of details the scholarship committee asks for, if your student misses that and another student doesn't, they're not going to be able to beat a student that followed all the rules. Second is to define the audience for the essay. While they may not know who exactly is going to be reviewing the essay, they can pull some details about the organization and see what organization's passions and mission and values are and see if they can sprinkle those throughout the essay showing that they really did their research. Next I want to recommend brainstorming. We have a three-step writing method inside the scholarship system, our online course, and one of the first steps is not to sit at the computer, not to start writing. It is to start brainstorming. We have a specific way to do this, but the reason we want to do that is because we want to get students out of thinking linearly, which is what we're doing when we're typing on the computer, thinking linearly, and instead thinking creatively. We want to think outside the box. We want to think of unique stories and answers to the prompt. The only way to do that is to get out of that linear thinking. So by brainstorming before we write, this will naturally increase our creativity. So if you are a member of the scholarship system, then you want to look into our mind mapping instructions. This is all in step five. If you are not, then try to get your student to get that piece of paper down and brainstorming. And I'm talking a real piece of paper with a pen or a pencil and just brain-dumping ideas, not in any order, just bullet points, and this will naturally increase the quality of the essay. Now the next suggestion is to choose the right topic to cover. We don't want to just pick some vague, general, common response to an essay prompt. In fact, in the scholarship system, we give out annual scholarships, and we had nearly 700 submissions this past year, and we saw a lot of the same answer over and over and over, and by the end of it, we didn't want to hear that word again, okay? Now I actually shared this in a live, so if you don't follow us on Facebook or Instagram, then you may want to because that's a little secret I shared. But that said, we want to make sure we're connecting with the reader. We want to share something that's personal and connects to our life and an actual experience versus just speaking in vague examples or in common keywords, buzzwords. The other thing that we can do here is not just avoid common generalities, but also speaking to how this will help us in the future, showing that it's not just about getting the money, it's about everything that I'm going to do with it. So that again makes it more personal and increases the connection. Comment below, what is one of the essay prompts that your student has seen the most? What is a common one that they've come across? Maybe we can brainstorm together. Now one of the common essay prompts that we see is, why do we deserve the scholarship? So I actually have an entire YouTube video on that one, so you can find that also linked somewhere here on the screen as well as in the description. You'll have all the important links in the description, so make sure you don't hop off too quickly. Check those out after this video. Okay, now I want to talk about for the next suggestion, structuring a winning scholarship essay. So when it comes to structure, then there will be, it's not like a term paper where we want to make three arguments and close necessarily. But we do want an introduction, we do want a body, and we do want a conclusion. So there is still a structure to a scholarship essay, but it is written a lot more fluidly, a lot more creatively. It doesn't have to be like a research paper, like I said. So that said, that introduction, we want it to be creative, attention-grabbing, memorable, a story. The body should have actual discussion points, a single point that we're making and an example to prove it. We don't want to just tell them that we are X, we want to show them. Transitions. Again, with transitions, this is all about how can we make the essay smooth, how can we connect every point we want to make, how can we create a flow to where I'm not just throwing a new story or a new point out of left field. This is also where it helps to have that brainstorm, that structure of main points we want to cover but not necessarily an essay written. And then really the art comes into crafting how it all connects. Then the conclusion. Now I actually do enjoy students that have written a conclusion that does pull in the prompt at the end. I'm not a fan of the prompt at the beginning because the beginning we want to be attention-grabbing and storytelling, etc. But at the end we can summarize it and kind of pull in the prompts that they know we've answered the question. Okay, that's a lot already, but I do have two more quick tips on how to write a winning scholarship essay. And if you found this helpful, I'm just gonna let you know right now, hit subscribe because this is just the tip of the iceberg. Every week we release a new strategy to help you with paying for college. All right, so the next one is getting an outside opinion. We at the scholarship system do professional essay reviews. You can add them on as a package or purchase them separately. However, you can also have your student reach out to professors or English teachers. But the thing is, as a parent, unless you have writing experience, please don't assume that you can proofread it. I really recommend getting an outside opinion. That way it's just an extra opinion and it can be a selling point. It can really be, it can make that essay a lot stronger by having someone that's experienced in specifically creative writing, if possible. And then lastly, finalizing and submitting. We want to run through the criteria. Remember at the beginning of today's video, I talked about all of the rules and the requirements. We want to make sure we check all those boxes. We want to make sure we don't have any kind of grammatical or proofread, missed anything during proofreading. We can even read it out loud and see if we stumble anywhere. And oftentimes that will point out some kind of error. So that finalizing is so important and it should be done every single time as if it's a new essay, even if it's being reused. Okay, by following all of these suggestions already, I guarantee you, your student will have a better essay than at least half of the other applicants. These tips are so important and we've seen it again for almost a decade in the scholarship system, over and over. We've seen so many students where they missed some of these and if they had done it, it would have just made that essay that much better. That essay is so important and that is why we focus on it so heavily in the scholarship system. Okay, if you have any questions at all, please comment below. And again, make sure you hit subscribe because we have tips for you and your student every single week here at the scholarship system's YouTube channel. And I will see you in the next video.