Reusable Materials 32: Questions About Scholarship Essays

Thursdays we discuss how reusable materials help you WOW committees and save time

John asked us for help applying for scholarships. He already had enough scholarships to pay all the tuition for his undergraduate degree. He wanted more money to help defray his housing, books, food, transportation, and to buy a new laptop computer. He struggled with the essays some applications required. He wasn’t sure what topics scholarship committees required, if he needed to write all new essays, or how to modify his existing essays. Our team worked with him for several sessions. He now has 6 great 500 word essays to use and reuse. He submits about 4 applications a month. It takes him less than 10 minutes to personalize his reusable essays to the purpose of each application.

Q: How do themes & value statements differ from essays?

You use themes and value statements to answer the larger application fields such as:

• “Describe your leadership experience”
• “Outline your athletic background”
• “Highlight your academic achievements”
• “Tell us about your extracurricular activities”

Your answers to these questions seldom require more than one paragraph. Generally, you use only one theme, and may not use all the categories or value statements. You select those that will apply best to the purpose of that scholarship sponsor.

Essays differ in the following aspects. Typically, committees

• Request you to submit an essay on a topic of their choice
• Require a specific word length (currently 350-500 words)
• Expect to see a traditional structure for essays of opening, body, and conclusion

Q: Can I ever use themes and value statements as essays?

You may expand a theme with its value statements into an essay. by providing more background and details about what you did. In those situations

• Introduce why this theme is important to you in an opening paragraph
• Describe each category in a separate paragraph
• Detail the background of the situation
• Provide more details and stories about what happened  
• Summarize, in a closing paragraph, the benefits of your experience

Saturday we will share the tip to help you prioritize your efforts to get money for college

This blog will improve as you submit comments, questions, and experiences. We will answer your questions in future blog posts. Please submit your comments and questions so we can answer them.