How To Make Successful Scholarship Applications

As a student, I always seek new opportunities to gain tangible real-life skills and knowledge I can’t gain in a classroom setting. Illuminate’s Associate National Lead programs gives me the opportunity to do just that while also gaining invaluable skills in the process. This Saturday, I got to attend Tomiwa Ademidun’s Think Tank on “How to get scholarships” as a part of the Associate National Lead program and was exposed to a number of new viewpoints and perspectives.

Scholarships have especially proven to be an important part as the average student leaves university with $28,000 in Student loans! As a result, scholarships are crucial to your university journey because they help your academics and goals by removing the financial barrier. Getting a scholarship takes away some of the financial concerns. Thus, it gives you more time to study, gain knowledge and secure better grades.

Firstly, I gained much knowledge on how to write a strong scholarship application. A few major tips and trick would be:

1. To provide proof and examples of the previous work that you did and relate it back to your passions and the scholarship. It is also best to link your previous work into the application–such as attaching hyperlinks of articles you wrote or social media you managed.

2. You have to be specific with what you write, adding times, dates, reasons and examples for what you are talking about will allow for the reviewer to understand more about both you as a person and your experiences.

3. Length of writing, A rule of thumb is for the writing to be “As long as necessary and as short as possible”. This means for your writing to be detailed enough so it is easily understood, while also keeping it concise and to the point. Refrain from writing too much in detail on unrelated topics along the way as it would make the writing difficult to follow, especially for the reviewers of the application.

4. Use resources to edit and improve your writing. There are many online resources that can help you edit your writing such as grammarly, quillbot, paraphrase, etc. to make your writing, again, more concise and to the point.

Minor improvements are crucial to applications because it makes your writing more noticeable and readable. Ultimately making successful applications.

Another important part is to start considering scholarship early! There are scholarships that you can apply for even in earlier years of highschool (Grades 9-11). Additionally, looking into scholarship early on would help you have more time to consider your writing.

Ultimately, scholarships are an important factor to consider when moving forward with college or university, and I highly recommend for everyone to start considering scholarships early on!