How to write a winning scholarship essay - Gen Tanabe, Kelly Tanabe 2018

Meet the scholarship judges
Judges’ Roundtable: inside the selection process

In this chapter:

■ Get the inside scoop from real scholarship judges and experts

■ Discover how the selection process actually works

■ See who judges the competitions

■ Understand what makes the difference between being a winner and a runner-up

Meet the scholarship judges

This is the first of three Judges’ Roundtables in this book. We present these candid conversations with actual scholarship judges and experts so that you can hear in their own words what works and what doesn’t.

Imagine that you were trying to win $1,000. One way to do this would be to buy a lottery ticket. Another way would be to apply for a scholarship. The difference between the two is that you cannot affect your chances of winning the lottery, but you can affect your chances of winning a scholarship.

When applying for scholarship competitions, one of the most important things to understand is why the organization is giving the award.

Every organization has a reason for providing funds to students. These reasons can be quite varied. The organization may want to contribute to the communities in which it does business, increase the status of members of a minority or underrepresented group or build morale among its employees.

By understanding what the organization hopes to achieve through its scholarship program, you can develop essays and interview answers that best show how you fulfill the mission of the award. Here are some examples of purposes of scholarship programs. Try to imagine that you are applying to these awards and think about how knowing the purpose of each scholarship would help you to create a better application.