Free Advice From a Real Scholarship Judge.

Judges know that you would very much like to receive the scholarships that you apply for. It’s natural for you to have some emotional stock in whether you win or not. College costs are serious business, and every dime you can get someone else to pick up for you, the better.

Creatively making ends meet is what it's all about.

But in hundreds of applications over the years, we’ve seen applicants taking this to extreme levels. Time after time, students write that if they don’t receive this very scholarship, they probably won’t be able to attend college. Or they won’t be able to pay the rent, or they’ll be kicked out into the streets (I’m not exaggerating here).

Now I admit that one of my purposes in creating the Give Me Scholarships site and writing the book is to help you manipulate the scholarship judges and, where appropriate, play on their emotions to your advantage. But remember, it’s a fine line. You must be careful about how hard to try to tug on the judges’ heartstrings. There are a couple of reasons why laying on the desperation in a scholarship essay is a bad idea:

1) It puts undue and unwelcome pressure on the scholarship committee. Judges are human, and no one wants to feel like the person who flushed a kid’s educational dreams down the toilet, or worse yet, got you tossed out of your apartment and onto the streets. Committee members have a heart, but they also have a job to do, and that’s to select the most qualified applicant. By suggesting that you won’t make it without them, you put them in a bind. How? Well, you’re not the only one doing it! There are a dozen stories a week just like these. And when there’s one scholarship to give and 12 people (this week) who say they can’t make ends meet without the award, then it’s a lot easier for the committee to trash all 12 and get back to its job of selecting the most qualified applicant.

2)From a more practical standpoint, you should never depend on receiving any one scholarship. The odds are always stacked against you (although less so now that you’re reading these emails), and placing your hopes on one award is like putting all your money on one roulette number. Always have a backup plan. Always investigate all your student loan options, grants, jobs, etc. Even someone with all the inside info in the Superpack shouldn’t bank on receiving scholarships if at all possible. Develop your educational plan first, including costs and how to pay for them; then, as you receive scholarships, start erasing sources of funds like loans and jobs as they’re no longer needed.

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I know, I know – that’s an abrasive way of putting it for those of you who are easily wounded. In other words, then, do yourself a favor: exclude any unnecessary information that has nothing to do with your essay. Everything in your essay should be relevant to the topic at hand.

This is us after we read most scholarship essays.

We receive bad examples of staying on topic every day. They’re the essays that start like this: “My name is Jane Doe, and I was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania on July 3, 1986. My mother is a dental hygienist and my father is a mortgage broker, and I have two brothers and two sisters. I attend Kennedy High School, where I am a senior.”

Unless you’re somehow going to tie that information into some critically important part of your essay, the committee doesn’t care a lick about any of it; instead, it sounds suspiciously like you’re trying to fill up space on the page and nothing more.

Unless you’re bringing up things like your birthplace, parents and siblings in order to shed light on your unique upbringing – let’s say, you were born to crack-addicted parents in Miami who dropped you off in the Everglades as a newborn, but a family of alligators took you in and raised you as one of their own, and that’s the reason you’ve been captain of the varsity swim team since age 11 – then info like this is a waste of space and a waste of the committee’s time. We call it “commodity information.” Everyone has a birth date, a school and a hometown, and unless yours have some sort of special significance, leave them out of your essay.

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Scholarship essays are certainly about self-expression, and lots of applications ask open-ended questions about how you, the forward-thinking leader of tomorrow, might solve today’s problems. That gives you full license to come out with your ideas on how to change things, and in so doing, you’ll probably find yourself pointing out the flaws of society — i.e., the things that need to be changed. But be careful about getting on a “high horse” and sounding too judgmental or preachy, or giving the impression that solutions to the world’s problems are obvious.

Leave the moralizing and proselytizing to the televangelists.

Let me point out why this is important. There are legions of intelligent young people out there, but maturity eludes many of them. Intelligence is cheap. Maturity is priceless. If I had to choose a single most important quality in scholarship winners, it would be maturity. Show maturity in your essays and you’ll be much more likely to bring home a check.

Why is this? It’s because you’re headed into a make-or-break stage of your life when you hit college. The things you do there — even seemingly small things — will have an immense, life-altering effect on your future. And it’s maturity, not raw intelligence, that is your key to handling those situations successfully. You may be a wizard at literature or science or economics or whatever, but if you can’t handle the pressures of the world, you’re likely to flame out and not meet the goals you have for yourself right now.

As scholarship judges, we don’t want to give money to people who are going to flame out. We want to give money to the ones who are going to make it. Hence, we look for and place great value on maturity. Got it? OK.

So, how do we tell who’s mature and who’s not? Well, it’s an inexact science, to be sure. But one of the hallmarks of maturity in young people is their ability to balance their own big ideas with the knowledge that the world is complex, and that they still have a lot to learn. The world is a complex place, and solutions to society’s most difficult problems are hard to find. That doesn’t mean you can’t help solve them someday; it just means that, if we’re talking about a real problem, it’s not going to be easy to solve.

With that in mind, if you catch yourself writing overly simplistic phrases such as, “If more people would just…” or “The world would be a better place if we would just wake up and realize,” remember that the problems you’re talking about probably don’t have solutions as simple as you think. I’m not positive, but few major problems have ever been solved by a collective bunch of folks all spontaneously “waking up and realizing” anything. Your scholarship judges are educated and know this all too well. Preachy proposals will likely lead to some eye-rolling when your essay is being read, and that’s not good for you.

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Over the past two days, I’ve written about how school activities alone aren’t enough to win you scholarships, and that worried some of you quite a bit. Fear not, friends: today we’re continuing yesterday’s discussion of how to beef up those applications and cash in on the mistakes of your classmates. Here’s a huge but simple tip:

Brevity is good. Withholding key details is bad.

Talk about what you’ve actually done – not just the groups you’ve joined. Sure, you were in your church’s youth group. And you can put “Four years in my church youth group” in your application if you want. But if you do that, you’re not telling me much. Since I haven’t been to your church, I don’t know what your church’s youth group does. For all I know, you could be building full-scale models of Noah’s Ark and doing research at the Dead Sea, or you could all be taking a one-hour nap every Sunday. I have no idea. You have to tell me.

Set yourself apart, then, by talking about what you did over that time. Let’s say you spend four years in your church youth group serving meals to the homeless one day a week in a soup kitchen. Maybe you served an average of 150 people on each of those days in the soup kitchen (it’s OK to give an honest estimate — you’re not expected to be exact on matters like this). There are 208 weeks in four years, and that means you served 31,200 meals to homeless people during high school.

Now that’s impressive. But I’d have never known about it if all you put on your scholarship application was “Spent 4 years in church youth group,” now would I? If you want us to know you’re industrious, you have to tell us what you’ve done. That makes the difference between a boring, commodity essay and one that makes the committee’s eyes pop.

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Yesterday I wrote about how school activities alone weren’t enough to win you scholarships, and that sent some of you into a panic. Seems many readers have been banking quite heavily on those school activities to win you some money. Not to worry: Today and tomorrow, we’re addressing how to beef up those applications and cash in on the mistakes of the other 99% of your classmates. You don’t have to cure cancer or stop global warming to win a scholarship — you just need to have a little more information than your classmates. And thanks to these emails, you’re going to have a LOT more. Here are two tips that will kick your scholarship applications into high gear and leave your friends in the dust (sorry, friends, but it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there).

Blood is thicker than water. Capisce?

Don’t forget your family. I know that we on the scholarship committees miss some incredible stories every day when our applicants write scholarship essays and mention absolutely nothing about the role they play in their own families. Let me say this clearly: your role in your own family is not as important as your school activities – it’s MORE important. Hey, let’s be honest: School will be over in a few years, but your family is around forever. Members of the cheerleading squad or the football team or the science club will forget your name in 10 years (trust me, it’s true — I’ve been to class reunions), but your family never will.

Probably the biggest crying shame in the entire world of scholarships is that, for years, thousands of excellent students have been passed over for scholarships. They are the students who have had no time to participate in extracurricular activities because they had to care for their families or work paying jobs to do so. Worse yet, those students are made to feel like they shouldn’t even apply, because they’re not “active” enough.

That’s the biggest and most unfair load of garbage I’ve ever heard, and don’t let anyone sell it to you. If you’re so busy with family responsibilities that you can’t involve yourself in student organizations, then you may just have a stronger application than those who do. But remember: We can’t give you credit for your family responsibilities if you don’t tell us what they are! So by all means, if it’s applicable to you, go into detail about how you spend time doing things for your family.

In the particular case of our company’s scholarships, we’ve always given heavy weight to “work ethic,” and that’s as applicable to those who work hard in their homes and at paying jobs as it is to those who work hard on the varsity field or inside the school walls. Our unwavering advice for scholarship essays is this: Tell your story, regardless of where it takes place.

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The average scholarship applicant lists a truckload of school-sanctioned activities in which he/she has participated over the four years of high school. Sports teams, clubs, projects, competitions, etc. This can only be a good thing, right? After all, that’s what your parents and counselors have been telling you all along — the more stuff you participate in, clubs you join, activities you do, etc., the more well-rounded student you appear to be. And that’s all true, but it’s not the end of the story.

These people are trapped in high school. You are not.

Frankly, school-related activities on their own just aren’t enough to grab a scholarship committee’s attention anymore. In addition to these common activities, you’ve got to go beyond the high school stuff if you want to grab the big scholarship bucks. Here’s why: The Internet has opened scholarship opportunities up to thousands of applicants who wouldn’t have been competing with you for this scholarship 10 years ago. And that means the less unique your essay is, the more likely it is that you’ll be passed over for the scholarship.

And about 99% of the application essays that students are writing these days talk about nothing but common high-school stuff: sports teams, clubs, groups — basically, I’m talking about any group they take a picture of for the yearbook. If there’s nothing but “high school stuff” in your essay, it’ll just be part of one big blur to the scholarship committee, and it’ll end up in the trash. They see literally hundreds of essays come in with that same stuff in them every single day. Not even a scroll of AP classes and high SAT scores are going to set you significantly apart from your competitors.

So does that mean you’re a loser, you and your four years of science club, soccer team, dance team, school play and varsity band? Of course not — that’s all great stuff and you should be glad you did it. But on its own, it’s not going to win you much scholarship money. The cold reality of the Internet age is that you’ve got to go beyond the ordinary to win big money — and, sadly, four years chock full of school activities is now considered ordinary.

You’ll have to dig for something deeper, better, more unique.

How, you say? Keep your pants on…that’s tomorrow’s topic.

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