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

What qualities make an essay powerful?
Judges’ roundtable: the scholarship essay

One of the keys to writing a powerful scholarship essay is to be honest and to write from the heart. The scholarship judges and experts have stressed that they can see through an essay that is not honest and that the best essays are about something for which the applicants are truly passionate.

Georgina Salguero

Hispanic Heritage Youth Awards

“We look at how you develop your thesis statement. What are you going to talk about and do you stick to those points?

Do your paragraph structures make sense? We can tell how passionate you are for your subject by how you write. Don’t just write that you want to attend college because you know you have to go to school. Instead, tell us why. Why do you want to go to college? What drives you? What gives you the strength to keep going?”

Shirley Kennedy Keller

American Association of School Administrators “It’s very important for them to be specific, to give specific examples of their leadership, special talents, obstacles or community service. The more specific they can be and the more they can back up their statements, the better they’re going to fare in the judging process.”

Kimberly Hall

United Negro College Fund

“Essays should be well developed in terms of the paragraph structure. The essay should have a definite purpose and direction. By the end of the essay we should know where you have started from and where you are heading. We want to see what you have dealt with and what your plan of action is. We also want to see where you see yourself in the future.”

Trisha Bazemore

Coca-Cola Scholars Foundation

“You can tell when you read an essay if it’s a real expression of something the student really cares about or if it was written just to impress. We intentionally don’t provide students with instructions for the essay. We want to give each student the opportunity to be genuine.”

Jacqui Love Marshall

Knight Ridder Minority Scholars Program

“Your essay needs to fit the scholarship. Sometimes when reading an essay you get the feeling that the essay was written generically for 60 different scholarships and the author just substituted newspapering for engineering. If you want to win our scholarship your essay needs to tie into your involvement to the things we care about like the newspaper, photography or the sales or marketing side of the business.”

Wanda Carroll

National Association of Secondary School Principals “Go back to your basic English lessons and remember all that your English teacher taught. Make sure your essay is concise and there’s a point to what you’re writing.”

Laura DiFiore

FreSch! Free Scholarship Search

“If you can make the reader laugh, cry or get angry, even when you’re just writing about yourself, you’ve already won half the game. That’s the bottom line. Get an emotional response out of the reader.”