How to write a winning scholarship essay - Gen Tanabe, Kelly Tanabe 2018
Essays about family
30 winning scholarship essays
Rodolfo valadez, cohen foundation scholarship winner Going to Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, California, Rodolfo discovered his passion: filmmaking. While making movies including his critically acclaimed documentary “los angeles,” which was screened at the Sundance Film Festival, is his passion, Rodolfo’s inspiration is his mother. Rodolfo freely admits that his mother is “my support, my help, my guidance, my friend, my hero.” With this essay, Rodolfo won a $6,000 scholarship from the Cohen Foundation and $7,000 scholarship from the Hispanic Heritage Youth Awards to attend the University of California at Los Angeles.
A Mother’s Sacrifice
My mother sat in between the dry grass growing out of the puddle of dirt water under a bridge in the hills separating Mexico from San Diego.
In that exact moment I sat aboard a plane with strangers and in possession of a name other than mine in order to be granted admission into the United States. It has now been 14 years, and my mother still sacrifices her own comfort for mine. She works nine hours a day, six days a week in a machine-like position, humped over a sewing machine, altering clothes for strangers. At the same time I sit in class, socializing, enjoying a productive school day.
However, my mother is fulfilled knowing that her children take advantage of the vast opportunities this country has to offer despite the hardships she has to endure for a weekly paycheck. A paycheck she has vowed to invest into my college education at UCLA, an institution requiring almost $16,000
a year. At her hourly salary and after taxes she would have to work 2,560
hours in order to pay a year’s tuition, which equals working 10,240 hours over the four years of college. If asked to, she would be more than willing to undergo the task of paying for my education knowing fully the standards and strife she would burden herself with.
In my sophomore year, I was among 24 honor students sequestered into a film course. I became one of the first students to attend the annual Telluride Film Festival in Colorado. In my second year in the course I attended the Sundance Film Festival where I was able to display my own work.
Again, in my final year, we were invited to Sundance to show more films from our Academy of Film and Theatre Arts.
The film I showcased in the student forum was a documentary film com-memorating my mother’s struggle and sacrifice ever since her departure from a small oasis named Los Angeles in Durango, Mexico, only to move into the cold, industrial city of Los Angeles, California. The film depicts her struggle and reason for doing so. It also illuminates the fact that more like her exist all around us.
The film course at my high school has been my passion. For three years the course taught me to acquire a more perceptive and critical view of the world. Throughout the course we studied Aristotle’s philosophies and the evolution of cinematography, and we analyzed films and wrote essays comparing the motifs they translate into a sequence of shots. I have become more creative and just recently started working on a new 16 mm film entitled “Love Story.” As clichéd as the title suggests, the story is a satire of what the title represents. Such projects motivate me to work even when class is over. In the last three years I have found myself in class Saturday mornings and afternoons, editing and brainstorming ideas with classmates.
I have my mother to thank for being able to pursue my passion in filmmaking. I realize she gave up everything for me, and I will do what I can to make it well worth it.
Jessica Haskins, supercollege.com scholarship winner Jessica’s dream is to write fantasy novels and short stories. Throughout her time at Saratoga Springs High School in Saratoga Springs, New York, Jessica took challenging classes and focused on obtaining a wide breadth of knowledge that would be useful in her future career. She is studying creative writing at Bard College. Outside of classes, she keeps up her writing with day and dream journals. When writing her essay, Jessica had a difficult time with the length requirement. “Editing is terrible,” she admits, but after much cutting she was able to pare down her essay to meet the requirements. Although Jessica was worried that her essay had lost much of its power, her editors assured her that it had not. Obviously, the judges concurred.
Thank you, Dr. Seuss
(With Special Recognition for the Trenton, Georgia, School System) More than anything else I can think up as a reason, my mother is why I’m going to college. Because of her, there could be no other decision. Not that I’m being forced or anything, but she has heavily influenced me and my decision. In a good way.
She always regretted that she could never go to college. Her parents, her teachers and her school counselors somehow, even though I still have trouble understanding it, simply never arranged it for her. College has always been a foregone conclusion for me, so this seems bizarre. To this day, she’s never been able to explain it to my satisfaction. Nor to her own.
My mother is a very intelligent woman and was one of the best students in her small-town, athletics-minded Georgia high school (3rd or so in her class, where rank was unweighted and the valedictorian did as little as she could to get 100’s in easy classes). She’s certain that she could have accomplished a lot in life if she’d only been able to get a college education.
She swears her education actually stopped at 9th grade, when she moved from Illinois to Georgia. I’ve seen the white sticker she uses as a bookmark in her gigantic Random House Dictionary of the English Language. It says “I [heart] Georgia,” with the heart crossed out in black marker. She does love things like warm weather, big flowers and Southern cooking but despises their educational system.
I grew up knowing how keenly she lamented her missed opportunity, and she passed on her appreciation for the value of education to me. From the start she raised me to be an intellectual. I could read by age 3. I have a vivid memory of lying on the couch with her in the living room of our old house right on Route 9, where the cars would streak past day and night.
My mother was reading Dr. Seuss to me—“We run for fun in the hot, hot sun,” from One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish—and afternoon sunlight was pouring in through the windows, warming the whole room. As she read, I followed along. That was my first memory of ever actually reading the words, rather than just being read to. Whenever I think of my educational success, I attribute it first and foremost to learning to read at an early age, and the very next thing I think of is that reading lesson in the sun.
I have another memory. Me, at about the same age, confronting my father in the bathroom and asking, “Daddy, when can I go to school?” I just couldn’t wait. I went to two years of preschool, where I did very well, except that I wasn’t very generous. Recently I was poking through my old school files and found a couple of reports from one of my preschools.
In fact, let me go get them so that I can quote it exactly—ah, here it is.
“Jessica needs prompting to share.” I found that very amusing. Now that I think about it, I was pretty attached to that Viewmaster.
When I was finally old enough I went to kindergarten, but nothing there was a challenge for me, and my parents and I all wanted me to skip a grade. It took a little battling with the school, which was reluctant to move me ahead, and some extensive testing, but they finally agreed to have me skip first grade. I’m glad that I did. Even though I was younger than the other kids in my grade, I took advanced classes whenever there was an opportunity. Because of the importance my mother always placed on education, I was always ready to take on harder material.
As I said before, it was always a given that I would go to college. My mother wanted it for me, and I wanted it for myself. And not just any college—my aim was never to just get a degree and a good job, but to continue to enrich myself. The “good job” isn’t even guaranteed. After all, I want to be a writer, and there’s no ticket to success in that field without a good bit of luck. So my standards for college are slightly different. Basically what I want is the most liberal of liberal arts. I want to continue the educational path that started way back when I was lying on the living room couch reading One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish with my mother, who knew I’d someday get the college experience she never had. So thank you, Dr. Seuss. And thank you, Mom.