How to write a winning scholarship essay - Gen Tanabe, Kelly Tanabe 2018
Essays about leadership
30 winning scholarship essays
swati deshmukh, discover card Tribute award scholarship winner
Swati has helped collect 500 pairs of shoes for hurricane victims in India, raised funds for flood victims in Venezuela and spearheaded a bottled water sale fundraiser to aid flood victims in Mozambique. And these are just some of her efforts abroad.
At home at East Lyme High School in Connecticut, Swati has committed herself to public service, crocheting blankets for premature babies, tutoring students who are refugees from Burma and organizing a book drive for needy libraries.
It is her service and leadership that helped her become one of the nine national winners of the Discover Card Tribute Award. In addition to volunteering, Swati has won numerous awards for her writing, including first place in her state for the National History Day competition.
Academically, she has a passion for research, studying organic synthesis of piezoelectric molecules as a participant in NASA’s Sharp Program.
She would like to eventually attend medical school.
A fight against discrimination
One good example of my continuing leadership is my efforts to diminish prejudice and spread feelings of well-being throughout the school. Nearly all of the students who attend my school are white, and I am in a very small minority. For this reason, I feel almost obliged or rather chosen to carry the torch and lead the warriors of unbiased acceptance in an endless war against discrimination.
At the end of my freshman year, I wrote a proposal for a Multi-Cultural Club to recognize and celebrate the minorities at our school. However, the school felt that this subject was covered by other clubs. Disagreeing with the administration, a faculty member at my school invited me to visit Westbrook High School where the Anti-Defamation League was running its program “Names Can Really Hurt Us.”
Amazed at what I saw, I labored to bring this program to my school to combat our problems. I convinced my principal to let the Anti-Defamation League come to our school, and I raised the $4,500 that was necessary.
With faculty members and other students, I formed the Diversity Team to help run the program. We selected 30 students to form the team, which would be trained by the ADL to help lead the program.
Now, every other week, I run meetings for the Diversity Team in which we prepare for the program. I have set up an e-mail system to contact them, and I have organized a special retreat for us. I also initiated a paper chain project in which every student in the school was given a slip of paper to decorate. The slips of paper will be linked together to form a chain.
My efforts to combat prejudice in the school have turned me into a leader of my peers. In guiding and directing others, I have discovered that I have the ability to lead others and motivate them to achieve great things. I plan to continue my leadership and maintain diversity programs at our school.