About This Site
What’s this site all about?
Short Answer: My name is Josh Barsch, and I started this site to help students stop screwing up their scholarship applications and win more money.
Long Answer (but still pretty short): I’m the CEO of StraightForward Media, and our company has been awarding scholarships for a long time now. I’ve been a judge for those scholarships since we began the programs in 2003, and I’ve read thousands upon thousands of scholarship applications. And, I’m sorry to say, most of them are pretty bad.
A vast majority of students (I’m talking over 90%, at least) make stupid mistakes that disqualify their essays almost immediately. At first, it made me laugh (you know, in the “Man, these kids today…” sense), but soon enough it became a little depressing. I’d have a stack of scholarship essays that would take me hours to read, and it was exhausting to think that only a handful of them would be winner material. To be honest, it also hacked me off at the educational system. Is there really no one out there teaching our high school students how to write an acceptable scholarship essay?
Apparently not. So I decided to do something about it. I wrote a short e-book on the subject, which was very helpful for the kids who bought it, but didn’t do much for the body of applicants as a whole. So I decided to put this website out there for everyone to use, for free. If you’d like to have all this information in a print book, you can buy it here if you want.
So look around as much as you like — the info is free and here for you to use. Use the navigation links at the top left to get around and find all of our tips, because there are a lot of them. If you have questions or comments, just leave them as blog comments and I’ll answer them as soon as possible. Enjoy!
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Bad News: 98% of applications get tossed in the trash. Yours is probably one of them.
More Bad News: Financial aid is drying up, even at big colleges. Without scholarships, you're probably screwed.
Good News: I'm a real judge who writes scholarship checks every month & I just released a guide to winning scholarship money. (Your teachers and counselors have it all wrong.)
