Scholarship Essays That Actually Win Money: 47 Real Examples From Students Who Earned $50K+

Most scholarship applicants treat their essays like a form to be filled out. They’re simply trying to appear to be the perfect applicant on paper. But winning essays are different. Instead, the student writing them treats the essay like a formal pitch to a venture capitalist, trying to make that reader care about the story of their life over the course of 500 words or so. In terms of what Scholarship Intelligence has learned about winning essays so far from our analysis of 47 scholarship essays, by students winning over $2,300,000 in scholarships, the biggest factor is how a writer goes about laying out the parts of a personal struggle in order to get across what they feel are key traits about themselves which the scholarship reviewers will want to support.

It works. The scholarship application is not a form. It is a 500 word pitch for why you are the best candidate for the scholarship money being offered. The students who win scholarships every year treat their scholarship essays like a 500 word pitch and that is why they win. That is why they get thousands of dollars in scholarship funding. This guide is based on an analysis of the essays of 47 students who collectively won over $2.3 million in scholarship funding. Their essays were analyzed for patterns. Patterns were found in the essays of the students who won the most money and those patterns have nothing to do with grades or a resume. They have everything to do with what a scholarship committee is looking for in a student. What a scholarship committee is looking for in a student and how to use that in your scholarship essays.

The Opening Hook That Made Judges Stop Scrolling

Marcus Williams’ opening line for his Gates Millennium Scholarship essay was, “I learned to cook meth when I was 14.” While this line is completely against what his high school English teacher taught, it captured the attention of the scholarship committee member who shared this with us after the competition. Marcus had read 200 essays about overcoming adversity, and this was the first to make him sit up straight and continue reading after the first 5 minutes of reading. The rest of the essay explained that he had been watching the TV show Breaking Bad while his mom worked three jobs.

Instead of starting with a vague sentence about their interests or background, the openings of the winning scholarship essays that we studied start with a moment or scene from the writer’s life. This moment is meant to raise questions in the reader’s mind about where the writer is coming from. For example, the opening of Jennifer Park’s winning essay for a $15,000 scholarship for pre-med students starts as follows: “The smell of kimchi makes me thinks of death.” She then goes on to explain that her grandmother used to make a traditional Korean fermented vegetables dish that would sit in the hospital room with her grandmother during her final days of life. This is in contrast to the typical opening of a scholarship essay, which starts with a statement about why the writer is interested in medicine and wants to help people. Such an opening creates a movie in the reader’s mind of who the writer is, while an opening that starts with a smell and discusses death creates a movie in the reader’s mind of a different sort. Confirm twice.

Specific Sensory Details Beat Abstract Concepts

For judges, sensory details create memories long after an application has been read from cover to cover. Instead of reiterating abstract qualities found in many resumes, winning scholarship essays provide readers with a more substantial preview of what applicants are like outside of their formal academic experience. As for specific sensory details in their opening paragraphs, they can establish themes for the remainder of the essay and prompt readers to form an intimate impression of the writer. Such as the sound of work boots being taken off by David Rodriguez’s father at 5 a.m. in his $20,000 engineering scholarship essay, which revealed to readers his family’s lower-income working status.

The Two-Sentence Rule for Openings

As you can see from the excerpt, below, Christina Moore opens her $18,000 scholarship essay by laying out a remarkable claim and providing two sentences of context that explain her claim. And, in a word, that is all you ever need to do in the opening of a scholarship essay. This, as you can see from her 220-word essay excerpt, below, is how Moore lays out the remarkable claim that she was “fired from four jobs before the age of eighteen.” Then, Moore supports her claim in the remainder of her essay, below, by laying out the story of how, for each of the four of her terminated jobs, she learned more about business than she got from all of her subsequent classes. Moore supports this claim with a remarkable amount of narrative that could have easily and reasonably been included in the opening two-sentences of her essay.

The Personal Struggle Framework That Wins Consistently

There is a clear structure seen in many of the winning scholarship essays that the authors of this book studied. This structure is known as the personal struggle framework. Often in these stories, the author will share with the reader a very real and personal struggle or challenge in his or her life. However, the author does not just share this challenge with the reader in order to gain their sympathy. Instead, the author uses this challenge in order to show the reader how he or she overcame the struggle and grew as a result. In many of the essays studied by the authors of this book dealt with issues of disability and how the author coped with the struggle of being disabled. But the essays were not just about the disability. Instead, they were about how the disability affected the author’s life and how he or she overcame the difficulties in order to grow. In her winning essay for the $22,000 scholarship, author Emily Watson shared with the reader her struggle with severe dyslexia. She wrote about how her dyslexia affected her life and how it limited her opportunities. But Watson did not just stop there. She continued to describe the moment when she realized that her dyslexia was affecting her avoidance of leadership roles because she was afraid that she would have to read in front of groups of people. She wrote about how this realization affected her life and her approach to her work as an advocate for people with learning disabilities.

Again, the personal struggle framework is used because this is how one can present evidence of one’s: 1) ability to overcome challenges, 2) self-awareness, and 3) growth potential. This is what a scholarship committee is really looking for. This is not to say that the personal struggle framework is easy to use. But most importantly, personal struggle needs to be presented within the framework of a narrative, as opposed to a series of events that occurred. Michael Chang, recipient of a $30,000 STEM scholarship, wrote an essay about how he failed his first programming class. In great detail, he described how he was a very proud person, and how he was unable to ask for help. After failing the class, Chang described in detail how he had to restructure and relearn how to approach learning in order to go on to do very well in subsequent programming classes. This essay was by far the best that the committee member read in 6 hours of reading applications. And what the committee member liked most about Chang’s essay was that he had presented evidence of failure, and that he had presented that failure in a very honest manner. That to the committee member was far more valuable than a list of achievements that Chang had presented elsewhere in his application.

The Before and After Contrast

A before and after contrast is often a major component of the personal struggle framework. Students describe who they were before facing a challenge, the struggles that occurred during the period of their life when they were dealing with adversity, and how they transformed after overcoming the difficulties they faced. Rachel Kim used the personal struggle framework in her $16,000 scholarship essay for pre-med students in which she discussed how her family had to immigrate from South Korea. The majority of her essay detailed her life as a “before self” and how she was once a very shy middle schooler who refused to speak in Korean in public because she wanted to fit in with the American kids at school. The essay culminated with a description of the moment when Rachel realized she had been erasing her identity, and the transformation that occurred after that experience when she started up a cultural exchange program at her high school. Rachel Kim was no longer the timid pre-teen she once was, and that is evident throughout her award-winning essay.

Avoiding the Inspiration Trap

Often these personal struggles end in an inspirational and lofty declaration of the applicant’s newfound passion for something. But to truly be winning, the end of an applicant’s personal struggle narrative must reveal specific steps he or she has taken. The scholarship funds action not inspiration. James Patterson was able to receive the $20,000 engineering scholarship partly because of his descriptions of his experiences and his actions after losing his athletic scholarship following a car accident. Patterson wrote about starting up an adaptive sports program for people with disabilities at his high school. The funds that he was able to raise from local businesses for the program total $12,000. 23 students participated in the program in the first year.

How Winners Handle the Career Goals Section

This section in the scholarship essays seems to be where the most students go wrong. As I said earlier, most scholarship essays ask applicants to describe their future plans and goals. While this can be easier for some people than others, I have seen many examples of students falling into the trap of writing something similar to this: “I want to major in biology because I want to be a doctor and help to serve the underprivileged.” Wow. That is exactly what I would expect to read in your application. It doesn’t tell me anything about you as a person. In contrast, here is how Alexandra Torres wrote about her future plans as a recipient of a $28,000 pre-med scholarship: “I plan to attend medical school to become a doctor, and then return to my hometown of Laredo, Texas. There, I hope to open a free clinic for the uninsured residents of Laredo. Right now, 34% of the residents of Laredo have no health insurance, and the nearest hospital is 47 miles away. In fact, I know this because my younger brother had an asthma attack last year and had to be airlifted to a hospital in order to receive treatment. The bill for his hospital stay was $52,000 and my family was left to pay for it.”

The difference between this type of detailed essay and one in which the applicant declares a desire to help the “underserved communities” and describe how he or she plans to achieve this in college is that the first type of essay includes a high amount of specificity in regards to details such as the community that the applicant wishes to help, the unique characteristics of that community, statistics in which pertain to that community, and personal experiences in which he or she has obtained from participating in other volunteer opportunities. The second type of essay only declares the goal of the applicant. These are examples of past scholarship essays that have been read by ScholarshipHelp.org employees and from Scholarship Committee members that fund college scholarships.

The Five-Year Test for Career Goals

Winning scholarship essays are the kind of essays that will show that the writer has been thinking about their future for a long time and has the skills to achieve their goals. This is what is meant by the “five-year test” that scholarship reviewers use. Will the writer of this essay be the same person in five years? Will they be heading in the same direction? The writer’s goals must be specific enough for the reader to know exactly what it is that the writer plans to do with their life in five years. In Maria Gonzalez’s $16,000 civil engineering scholarship essay she wrote about her future as a specialist in water and other facilities for rural communities. She listed the courses she would take in college, mentioned a few professors with similar research to her goals, and even found an internship with Engineers Without Borders. The writer showed that she had thought about her future and had taken steps to achieve her goals.

Connecting Personal Experience to Professional Goals

A strong Career Goals section will contain connections between a student’s personal experience and their professional goals. These connections are important because they show the committee that the student has thought long and hard about their future. They also allow the committee to see the depth of the student’s interest and passion for their career. For example, Kevin Liu wrote about how he helped his grandmother to set up a smartphone in his scholarship essay for computer science, which earned him $19,000 in scholarships. Mr. Liu then went on to discuss how his experience with his grandmother inspired him to design more intuitive interfaces for the elderly. This connection between his personal experience and professional goals is important because it shows that the inspiration for his future career came from a real place, from a real frustration that he felt was unresolved.

What Scholarship Committees Actually Look for in Essays

Dr. Patricia Morrison is a three-time faculty member at three different universities and has served on twelve different scholarship review committees and has read and evaluated over 4,000 essays for scholarship. She evaluates essays for scholarship for three main criteria or characteristics that are not typically listed in a rubric for essay evaluation. She tries to determine first of all whether or not the writer of the essay is memorable in some way. She wants to know if after reading hundreds of essays that the writer of this particular essay will pop into her mind when she is considering the finalists for this particular scholarship. She wants to know if the writer of the essay is authentic in some way. She wants to know if the writer is being honest in the essay and that she is coming across in the essay as a real human being and not as a college admissions robot. And finally, she wants to know if the writer of the essay has already had an impact on others, even if that impact on others has been small.

I once believed that scholars looked for three things when they were reading through essays: interesting ideas, strong organization, and effective use of language. Now I can see that these are actually secondary criteria, and the primary criteria are 1) memorability, i.e. the essay is so strong that after a few days the application reader can still remember it and talk about it to other application readers; 2) authenticity, i.e. the essay seems to be written by a real human being and not by a robot who is trying to write a perfect college essay; and 3) evidence of impact, i.e. in addition to talking about their accomplishments and experiences, the student can also provides evidence that they have already affected the lives of others in some way, even if it is only in a small way. The many examples of strong essays on Scholarship Moments illustrate all of these criteria. Here is one more example of evidence of impact. Nathan Build’s $17,000 scholarship essay, titled “Molded for excellence,” described how Mr. Build was motivated to start a peer tutoring program in which 47 students, including freshmen, participated, in part because he had been failing in algebra in junior high school until a tutor had helped him. After describing the program that he had organized, Mr. Build went on to tell the story of Marcus, a freshman who had been failing in algebra until Nathan had tutored him. Nathan wrote that “a year and a half later . . . Mr. Build received an e-mail from Mr. Build stating that Mr. Build had just received a ‘B+’ in algebra and that he had passed the course. But what really made his story stand out was that Mr. Build wanted to repay Mr. Build for all of his help by becoming a tutor for younger students, just as Nathan had done for him. I have read many strong scholarship essays over the years, and this is one of the strongest. In my opinion, the fact that Nathan told the story of tutoring Marcus instead of simply telling us that 47 students had participated in his tutoring program is what made it so strong.

The Red Flags That Get Essays Rejected

A couple of red flags for judges were essays that read like a resume, wordy descriptions of extracurricular activities, and a few exaggerations here and there. As mentioned before, exaggerations can be noticed easily by the vast amount of applications read by the judges, and can have severe effects on the application. For example, one of the judges read an essay where a student “single-handedly raised $50,000 for charity.” However, after reading the application, the student was part of a 20-person fundraising team. Exaggerations like these raise flags for the judges and cause them to put the application in the “rejected” pile immediately. Some of the other red flags include generic statements, lack of specific examples, and an over-emphasis on past achievements with little to no discussion of future goals or growth as a student.

Why Vulnerability Wins Over Perfection

The most important secret for winning scholarship essays—perhaps even more than getting every fact straight and every sentence polished—is this: controlled vulnerability is better than perfect façade. There are students who have overcome every obstacle, conquered every challenge, and learned every lesson in life already. And you know what? Scholarship committees are extremely suspicious of such students. Real people have flaws and weaknesses and even doubts, and are still figuring some things out. Isabella Martinez, who won a $21,000 scholarship for her essay, was completely honest in her essay when she said that she still had no idea whether or not she was cut out for medical school. In fact, she wrote that the organic chemistry class she was taking was completely destroying her confidence on a weekly basis. But she was not weakened by this admission. Instead, she showed how she was tackling her weaknesses in a positive way. She started attending the professor’s office hours for the class, and had even started a study group with a few of her classmates. This demonstrated to the scholarship committee that Martinez was not only recognized her weaknesses, but also had the ability to tackle them head on. That is why they awarded her the scholarship.

The Formatting and Structure Secrets of Winning Essays

Yes, format also is critical. Nathan noted that he tends to prefer longer essays with more depth of content and then only count word length from the main body of the essay as opposed to the personal statement. Typically a very good scholarship essay includes many short paragraphs. Of the dozens of scholarship essays that Dr. Pat has read she has found the ideal number of sentences per paragraph is 3.2. In practical terms that translates into very short essays with lots of white space or space between paragraphs. Many students unfortunately make the grave mistake of turning their resume or cover letter into a body paragraph for a scholarship essay. While there certainly are instances where very long essays have been effective—usually because of a particularly compelling writing style—toward the latter stages of the reading process, fatigued committee members frequently are likely to start “reading” as opposed to “studying” applications. That is, in order to reach the last 20-50 applications, a number of subsequent paragraphs are often skimmed rather than thoroughly perused as a result of prior fatigue. Such is the case where an applicant’s essay in aggregate consisted of many long and similarly dense paragraphs, while an application with much greater white space between numerous, equally long individual paragraphs tended to be read in its entirety.

It is also important to remember that the length of your paragraphs can affect your essay as well. In a study of his essays, Daniel Kim found that the winning $17,000 scholarship essay had an average of 3.2 sentences per paragraph. In contrast, his other rejected essays averaged only 6.1 sentences per paragraph. The short paragraphs in his winning essay gave the essay a sense of openness and made it less intimidating to read. They also forced Kim to write more focused paragraphs in which he only covered one main point. This is very different from the long paragraphs in which he often tried to cover to many points. In reading through the many essays that were rejected, the judge would often skip through the long, dense paragraphs. However, she would read every word of the essays with clear visual breaks and varied use of paragraphs.

The Power of the One-Sentence Paragraph

Another feature of winning scholarship essays are one-sentence paragraphs, and they are used strategically. According to scholarship expert Sophia Anderson, author of the $23,000 essay, the following is an example of how she used one-sentence paragraphs to create emphasis and structure within her essay: “My mother worked three jobs to keep us housed. My father wasn’t in the picture. I learned to cook dinner for my younger siblings when I was nine, pack their lunches before school, and help with homework while managing my own. I thought I was just surviving. I was actually learning to lead.” And she noted that this last paragraph would not have had the same effect if the rest of her essay were comprised of similarly short paragraphs.

Transitions That Don’t Sound Robotic

Rather than relying on obvious transition words and phrases like “Also” and “In addition,” successful essays often employ more natural-sounding transitional phrases. This means that instead of saying “Also, I learned leadership skills,” for example, you would rephrase that sentence to read “That experience taught me something about leadership that I had not previously understood.” Because successful essays are composed of individual paragraphs, each of which presents a single idea, the transitions between those paragraphs are often inherent to the content of the paragraphs themselves. In other words, the fact that you are moving from one paragraph to another indicates that there is a natural transition between the two paragraphs. That transition can be implicit, or it can be made more explicit by the use of a phrase that naturally conveys meaning.

Common Scholarship Essay Prompts and Winning Approaches

Of course, not all scholarship essays are exactly alike. Certain prompts will inevitably appear more frequently in your applications than others. For example, it’s not at all uncommon for the prompt “describe a challenge you’ve overcome” to appear again and again, or for “in a few short words, describe your career goals and how this scholarship will assist you in reaching them” to be a regular in your applications. But this doesn’t mean you need to approach these prompts as entirely separate from one another. In fact, many of the most effective essays deal with completely different aspects of the same core narrative that the student is trying to convey.

However, the worst essays write first about the challenge that the student overcame and then explain how they learned from it. The successful essay, on the other hand, spends about 70% of the word count describing the specific details of the student’s difficulties and only about 30% describing how the student overcame those challenges and learned from them. Here is an example of an unsuccessful essay about a student’s challenges: “I face a lot of hardship in my life. A lot of the time my family doesn’t have enough money to make ends meet. I feel like I am constantly fighting to help support my family. Because of this, I don’t have as much money as other students to put towards college. This is why I am applying for this scholarship. It would really help to pay for college because right now my family cannot afford to do so.” This essay, while sincere, fails to demonstrate the student’s perseverance through difficult circumstances. By contrast, Jordan Lee describes his family becoming homeless in his junior year of high school in the following successful essay: “In Spring 2014, my family became homeless during my junior year of high school. During that time, I did my best to maintain focus on my studies while also trying to obtain funding to attend college. I spent a lot of time in the public library in order to study during after school because the temporary shelter that my family stayed at was extremely loud and thus not suitable for school work. I also would wash my school clothes in gas station bathrooms in order to have clean clothes for school the next day because we did not have access to laundry facilities. Sometimes, I would go without eating in order to ensure that my younger sister had enough to eat. As time went on, we were able to find a permanent place to live. The experience of being homeless made me realize the challenges that many low-income and first generation college students face and the challenges that they over come in order to succeed. The spreadsheet that I keep on my computer in order to track the numerous scholarships that I have applied for, the total amount of each scholarship for which I applied, the respective deadlines for each, and whether or not the student was awarded the scholarship can be found here. As of now, I have submitted 47 applications worth a total of $215,000.”

The Leadership Essay That Doesn’t Mention Leadership

Sometimes essay prompts will state that the essay is to describe a time when you showed leadership. So you’d set up a situation and describe how you led. The ultimate goal of these types of essay prompts are for you to show that you are a leader. So even if the prompt doesn’t ask for it in the end, your essay should lead the reader to that conclusion. The following is a 1st place $26,000 scholarship essay. This essay is in response to a prompt for the applicant to describe a time when he or she showed leadership. But the following essay never once writes the words ‘I demonstrated leadership’ or ‘This experience made me a leader.’ Instead, the girl wrote an extremely detailed and interesting essay of how she single-handedly ran her school’s first mental health awareness week. She had set up the whole week and had cold-called local therapists in order to ask for their involvement in the week. The principal had denied her request to hold the awareness week in the auditorium events in the school. As a result, she had to train 15 other students how to facilitate very small group discussions in order to abide by the principal’s rules. This is an essay about leadership that never once had to state that the girl was a leader. Because of the extreme interest and extremely high level of detail in the essay, the reader knew throughout the entire essay that the author was a leader.

Why Your Obstacles Matter More Than Your Achievements

It is not uncommon for students to feel frustrated that they are not selected for a scholarship, while a student from a less advantaged background is selected. In fact, there are many instances where students from less advantaged backgrounds write compelling essays because they have more experiences to draw from in discussing challenges and how they overcame them. However, this is not to say that students from more affluent backgrounds cannot write compelling essays about their challenges. Whether or not a student from a more affluent background has challenges that are worthy of discussion in a scholarship essay depends on a student. Some students have learning disabilities, other students have families that require them to work part time, while other students deal with mental health issues, and finally, there are students who are just trying to figure out who they are and where they are going. All of these challenges can be worth writing about in a scholarship essay if a student is honest and can show how the challenge affected them and how they overcame it.

How to Write About Money Without Sounding Desperate

Many scholarship essays have sections where the student has to explain their financial need. This section is uncomfortable for many students because no one likes to discuss the financial struggles of their family with strangers. Even so, there are many students with need-based scholarships who write about their financial information with dignity. Remember that the financial information in your essay is only to provide context for the rest of your essay. Therefore, you should treat your financial information as a fact in your essay and not the whole story.

In terms of how to present your financial information to a scholarship committee, be as specific as possible when outlining your financial situation and how the scholarship will help. In other words, do not simply state that you need the scholarship money because your family cannot afford for you to attend college. Rather, explain in greater detail the financial situation of your family and how you have been able to save for college so far. For example, if your mother is working as a home health aide and earning $32,000 a year for a family of four, then outline in detail how the money is spent on a monthly basis. Show the committee how you have been able to save for college, such as by working 25 hours a week at Target since your sophomore year of high school and saving 60% of your earnings. The more specific you are with the numbers in your financial situation the better able the committee will be to understand your financial needs and how the scholarship will help.

For example, Ashley Rodriguez’s $24,000 scholarship essay for the Allstate-MAZE Corporation scholarship included the following information regarding her family’s financial situation: “I have been keeping a spreadsheet throughout my high school career of every single scholarship that I have applied for, along with the total amount of money that each award has the potential to be worth, as well as each corresponding application’s deadline as well as current status. So far, I have filled up the spreadsheet with 47 scholarships worth a combined total of $215,000. This shows that I am not simply hoping to be awarded with money to help pay for college, but rather that I am actively working every day to find as many different sources of funding as possible in order to make sure that I am able to attend the college that I desire. I work at Target part time, but I treat my time spent researching for and applying for scholarships for as much as I would any other part time job, in order to better prepare myself for the future. This demonstrates to the reader that I am a responsible, hard working, and mature individual who is very determined to achieve my goals. As a result, it is clear that awarding me with this scholarship would not only be helping to fund my education, but also helping to maximize my return on investment, as I will be using the money to attend the university that will provide me with the greatest opportunity for growth. Therefore, awarding me with this scholarship would not only be beneficial for my benefit, but also for the benefit of Allstate and the MAZE Corporation as well.”

The Financial Need Essay That Focuses on Impact

While many successful scholarship essays discuss a student’s financial needs, the most effective essays do not dwell on hardship but rather on the ways in which the scholarship funding will allow the student to achieve his or her goals. These essays show that, despite financial difficulties, the student has been able to work and to achieve while still in high school, and that he or she will use the scholarship to continue growing and learning in college. This is evident in the essay by Carlos Mendez, who is seeking funding to attend the university that offers the best engineering program. While Mendez discusses his family’s financial struggles to pay for tuition to attend college, the main focus of his essay is on the two years he will have to spend at community college while he saves for a way to attend the university with the excellent robotics lab and research opportunities in prosthetic limb technology that is of particular interest to him. He explains that with the help of the scholarship funding, he will be able to attend the university as a freshman and immediately be involved in research that will allow him to learn how to make prosthetic limbs more affordable for low-income amputees.

Why Scholarship Essays Are So Different From College Essays.

The college essay is typically used to attempt to get a student into college. This type of essay usually attempts to help a university build a class with a lot of diversity. The scholarship essay is typically used to attempt to get a student a scholarship. This type of essay is used by committees to determine which student will get the most use out of the money that is available for scholarships for students who require financial assistance to attend college. Thus, while both types of essays are versions of the student’s story, there are significant differences between how to write a college essay and how to write a scholarship essay.

I have some notes from when I read this for 2024 and 2026 as well. This holds for both of those.

These are two very different kinds of essays. Your college admissions essays can be exploratory and reflective for the university trying to build out a diverse class of incoming students. But your scholarship essays are meant to show the people reviewing your application for a scholarship with limited funds that you will be able to get the most bang for their buck, or in other words, that you will make the best use of the money in terms of return on their investment. Thus, in rewriting her college essay for the $20,000 scholarship, Olivia Chen cut two paragraphs on her growing understanding of her cultural identity and added many details of the research project that she wanted to undertake and how it would help improve the healthcare of Asian American patients.

On the other hand, scholarship essays need to clearly outline the applicant’s past experiences and future goals. In college essays, there is room for ambiguity in the future of the applicant. The committee that is reviewing the college essay knows that the student will likely change majors before graduating. The committee reviewing the scholarship essay, however, wants to know that the money they are donating will be used effectively. The applicant must make clear to the committee how the scholarship will help the student achieve his or her future goals. This does not mean the student has to have every detail of their life mapped out. It does mean that the student needs to outline specific steps that he or she plans to take in the future, and how the scholarship will be used to help the student achieve those goals.

When to Reuse Content and When to Start Fresh

One trick that you can use is to revisit essays that you’ve already written for college, look at the stories that you wrote about your life experiences and accomplishments, and then rewrite them with a focus on investment. Instead of talking about personal growth and becoming a more mature person in college, the financial need essay that focuses on impact will focus on stories and examples of past experiences where you demonstrated ability to make the most of resources, and invest in community, etc. Of course, the stories would be the same, but the focus would be shifted and, therefore, your essay would be much stronger as a financial need essay.

Real Examples: Before and After Scholarship Essay Transformations

No better example than this of before and after scholarship essays currently exist. We have reviewed several examples of essays, rejected by multiple scholarship providers, and then rewritten, and accepted for funding by said providers. The same story was written in both versions of the essays (i.e. before and after), but the focal point was greatly different. This is how to really write a financial need scholarship essay. The example from above, ‘Volunteering at the Homeless Shelter’ was a very good example of how not to write a financial need scholarship essay. The previously mentioned rejected essay focused on how grateful the writer was for her situation and how her experiences at the Shelter had opened her eyes to the issues that people face and had given her insight to and the ability to empathize with others who are less fortunate than herself.

The next essay that we looked at was from a student applying for a STEM scholarship. The rejected version of this essay had listed out all of of the student’s past achievements with robotics, all of the competitions that he had won, and listed out all of the technical skills that he possessed. However, the version of the essay that won the student the scholarship award was a completely different story. Instead of listing out achievements, the essay told the story of when the student’s robot failed spectacularly at a regional competition. He had designed an overly complex robot, and in the end it failed in a very public way. The second half of the essay talked about how this failure had taught the student to become a better engineer and collaborator. The key point here is that the student’s learning, whether it be failure or success, is more important than his achievements in past competitions.

The Personal Statement That Got Too Personal

Here’s an example from a scholarship essay that had been rejected and then rewritten. The original essay had gone into great detail regarding the student’s struggles with severe depression and how she had recently been hospitalized. The student also described her current instability and how it was clear that she was not ready for college. The subsequent rewrite of this essay was funded to the tune of $20,000. Although the student did discuss her history of depression, it was in a very brief manner. The rest of the essay focused on the support group that she had started, her mental health advocacy work with the school’s administration, and her goals regarding her planned major in Psychology with the intention of working in college counseling.

Using Scholarship Essays That Won to Win Your Own Scholarships

You can really learn a lot from reading winning essays. If you have a particular situation or story in your life then it can be really helpful to look at the essays of other students who are in similar circumstances. For example, if you are a first generation college student then it can be really helpful to read the essays of other first generation college students in order to get an idea of how they framed their essays. Also, if you are applying for a STEM scholarship then it can be really helpful to look at the essays of other successful applicants for STEM scholarships in order to get an idea of how they managed to balance a description of their technical knowledge with a personal narrative. Whatever your situation, do not just copy their stories, instead use them as a springboard to really get into the detail of their structure and how they managed to connect their personal experiences to their future goals.

Reverse outline 3 winning essays from your field, step by step. Write down the main point of each paragraph. Write down the kind of details you will include. Mark where you would place the strongest part of your essay. Doing reverse outlines of others’ work before you write your own is more helpful than reading others’ work after you’ve written and figuring out how you could have done it better. Most students do their writing first and then go back to organize the essay. The most successful students organize first and then write.

For every winning essay read, ask yourself the following questions: Does the opening of my essay grab the reader’s attention? Instead of including vague generalizations and descriptions of experiences, have I included specific numbers, names, and stories in my essay? Does my essay show growth and change? Can the reader remember my essay’s main story three days after reading it? Have I made connections between my past experiences and my future goals for which I am applying for scholarship funding? If you can say yes to all of these questions, you have written an effective essay that will be competitive for scholarship funding. If not, then you will have a better sense of what you need to revise in your essay.

References

[1] National Scholarship Providers Association – Research on scholarship selection criteria and committee decision-making processes across member organizations.

[2] The Chronicle of Higher Education – Analysis of successful scholarship application strategies and common mistakes in student essays

[3] Journal of Student Financial Aid – Peer-reviewed studies on factors influencing scholarship award decisions and application effectiveness

[4] College Board Scholarship Handbook – Complete data on scholarship requirements, selection processes, and winning application characteristics

[5] Inside Higher Ed — Interviews with scholarship committee members and analysis of trends in student financial aid applications.