Outlaw Student » 10 Scholarship Screwups

The $150,000 Scholarships That Aren’t on Fastweb

Judge Josh — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 06:01:47 +0000

First of all: Bookmark this page! You’ll want to re-read it many times in the near future.

And since you opened it, I’m going to assume that you’re at least a tiny bit interested in a scholarship that would pay you $150,000.

After all, it’s not like you haven’t thought about this topic before. If you’re like most people, you’ve watched contestants on TV game shows like “Deal or No Deal” or “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” and yelled at them to “Stop!” and “Take the money, you fool!” once they get up into that $150,000 range — sometimes even before that. We’ve all done this, because we know that $150,000 is life-changing money.

Brains and discipline can get you as much money as this man is pretending to have right now.

So why haven’t you applied for any of the $150,000 scholarships out there? Probably because you didn’t know they were there. So is there really a scholarship that’ll pay you $150,000? Of course. In fact, there isn’t just one, but hundreds of them. Thousands, even. But if you’re one of those game-show people who thinks $150,000 isn’t worth your trouble, then go ahead and close up this email and read no further.

Great, you’re still here. You won’t find these awards by Googling “$150,000 scholarship” or anything like that. Your path to $150,000 actually just starts with a more modest $5,000 in scholarship money. Let’s start with this example, shall we? It can be several scholarships adding up to $5,000, or one big $5,000 scholarship. That’s bigger than the average scholarship, probably, but there are thousands of scholarships out there that pay at least that much. This $5,000 is not a crazy, unattainable amount of scholarship money we’re talking about.

How does $5,000 in scholarship money end up paying you more than $150,000? It’s pretty simple, actually. I can explain it in two minutes, tops:

A $5,000 student loan, taken at 6.8 percent, will stick you with a monthly payment of $57.80, every month for 10 years. At the end of that 10-year period, your debt to the government is paid, and you’re done. No more loan payments after that. Now even if you get yourself a really low-paying job after college (I’m thinking schoolteacher, journalist, assistant manager at Wendy’s, etc.), that’s probably something you can easily handle, right? Right.

$5,000 in scholarship money is $5,000 you don’t have to take in student loans, right? Right. But we just established that you could handle that $57 payment every month, regardless of whether you owe it to the government or not. So let’s just say that you’re going to make that $57 payment every month anyway. But you’re not going to send the check to the government — you’re going to pay yourself. You’re going to send that measly $57 per month to your own savings or investment account. And just like before, you’re going to stop after 10 years, and never write another $57 check as long as you live. (If you want help or a recommendation on setting up this account, please just reply to this email with “advice” in the subject line.)

Fast forward to 10 years down the road from now, and we’ve got two scenarios here. In the “I got zero scholarships so I had to take the $5,000 student loan” scenario, you’ve paid your $57 per month and now you’re off the hook. You owe the government nothing…but you also have nothing to show for that $57 you paid out each month. However, in the “I got $5,000 in scholarships but decided to pay-my-damn-self the $57 each month anyway” scenario, your monthly payments have accumulated to $10,802.90 (assuming a standard yet conservative 8% return).

Not a bad start, for sure. I think we can agree that it’s better to have $10,000 than to have nothing. And by the way, my assumption here is that you graduated from college at age 25, and that you’re now 35 in this scenario, 10 years down the road.

But that’s only $10,000, not $150,000. Where does the rest come from?

Easy: it comes from compounded interest over time. Like I said in the beginning, you’re not going to contribute another dime. You’re going to forget the money is even there. And then, compound interest kicks in. Over the next 30 years, assuming that same conservative 8% return on your money, your $10,802 grows to $108,705. If you wait 35 years, it grows to $159,724.

Wow. But wait. THIS IS THE IMPORTANT PART:

And why do you have this sweet little nest egg waiting for you? Because you snagged a relatively small $5,000 in scholarship money. And instead of having to pay the government, you paid yourself. It’s that easy.

You were skeptical as you were reading this, I know. After all, if it was that easy to turn $5,000 into $150,000, then surely more people would do it. But they don’t, {!firstname_fix}, and the reason they don’t is because no one ever teaches them how. *But that’s what I’ve started to do over these last 12 emails — I’m starting to teach you how!* And all you’ve got to do is let me finish.

Over the last 12 days, I’ve started to show you how you can win the scholarships that mean the difference between being broke and having $150,000 in your bank account.

In return for all the info you need to get thousands of dollars in scholarships and, if you do it the smart way, over $150,000 waiting for you to play with later on in life — I charge $19.95 for the physical book and $9.95 for the virtual, downloadable book. That’s it.

C’mon — would anyone in your own FAMILY send you updates full of good advice for your ENTIRE LIFE for just twenty bucks? If so, you have a much less screwed-up family than I have.

Start getting all the scholarships you deserve. Many of your colleagues are doing the same thing, so don’t blow it off and let them end up kicking your butt in every scholarship competition you enter from now on.

Scholarship Screwup #10: Act Like You’ll Starve If You Don’t Win

Judge Josh — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 06:01:13 +0000

Judges know that you would very much like to receive the scholarships that you apply for. It’s natural for you to have some emotional stock in whether you win or not. College costs are serious business, and every dime you can get someone else to pick up for you, the better.

Creatively making ends meet is what it's all about.

But in hundreds of applications over the years, we’ve seen applicants taking this to extreme levels. Time after time, students write that if they don’t receive this very scholarship, they probably won’t be able to attend college. Or they won’t be able to pay the rent, or they’ll be kicked out into the streets (I’m not exaggerating here).

Now I admit that one of my purposes in creating the Outlaw Student site and writing the book is to help you manipulate the scholarship judges and, where appropriate, play on their emotions to your advantage. But remember, it’s a fine line. You must be careful about how hard to try to tug on the judges’ heartstrings. There are a couple of reasons why laying on the desperation in a scholarship essay is a bad idea:

1) It puts undue and unwelcome pressure on the scholarship committee. Judges are human, and no one wants to feel like the person who flushed a kid’s educational dreams down the toilet, or worse yet, got you tossed out of your apartment and onto the streets. Committee members have a heart, but they also have a job to do, and that’s to select the most qualified applicant. By suggesting that you won’t make it without them, you put them in a bind. How? Well, you’re not the only one doing it! There are a dozen stories a week just like these. And when there’s one scholarship to give and 12 people (this week) who say they can’t make ends meet without the award, then it’s a lot easier for the committee to trash all 12 and get back to its job of selecting the most qualified applicant.

2)From a more practical standpoint, you should never depend on receiving any one scholarship. The odds are always stacked against you (although less so now that you’re reading these emails), and placing your hopes on one award is like putting all your money on one roulette number. Always have a backup plan. Always investigate all your student loan options, grants, jobs, etc. Even someone with all the inside info in the Superpack shouldn’t bank on receiving scholarships if at all possible. Develop your educational plan first, including costs and how to pay for them; then, as you receive scholarships, start erasing sources of funds like loans and jobs as they’re no longer needed.

Scholarship Screwup #9: Bore Me With Irrelevant Crap

Judge Josh — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 06:01:37 +0000

I know, I know – that’s an abrasive way of putting it for those of you who are easily wounded. In other words, then, do yourself a favor: exclude any unnecessary information that has nothing to do with your scholarship essay. Everything in your essay should be relevant to the topic at hand.

This is us after we read most scholarship essays.

We receive bad examples of staying on topic every day. They’re the essays that start like this: “My name is Jane Doe, and I was born in Hershey, Pennsylvania on July 3, 1986. My mother is a dental hygienist and my father is a mortgage broker, and I have two brothers and two sisters. I attend Kennedy High School, where I am a senior.”

Unless you’re somehow going to tie that information into some critically important part of your essay, the committee doesn’t care a lick about any of it; instead, it sounds suspiciously like you’re trying to fill up space on the page and nothing more.

Unless you’re bringing up things like your birthplace, parents and siblings in order to shed light on your unique upbringing – let’s say, you were born to crack-addicted parents in Miami who dropped you off in the Everglades as a newborn, but a family of alligators took you in and raised you as one of their own, and that’s the reason you’ve been captain of the varsity swim team since age 11 – then info like this is a waste of space and a waste of the committee’s time. We call it “commodity information.” Everyone has a birth date, a school and a hometown, and unless yours have some sort of special significance, leave them out of your essay.

Scholarship Screwup #8: Preach To Me

Judge Josh — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 06:01:58 +0000

Scholarship essays are certainly about self-expression, and lots of applications ask open-ended questions about how you, the forward-thinking leader of tomorrow, might solve today’s problems. That gives you full license to come out with your ideas on how to change things, and in so doing, you’ll probably find yourself pointing out the flaws of society — i.e., the things that need to be changed. But be careful about getting on a “high horse” and sounding too judgmental or preachy, or giving the impression that solutions to the world’s problems are obvious.

Leave the moralizing and proselytizing to the televangelists.

Let me point out why this is important. There are legions of intelligent young people out there, but maturity eludes many of them. Intelligence is cheap. Maturity is priceless. If I had to choose a single most important quality in scholarship winners, it would be maturity. Show maturity in your essays and you’ll be much more likely to bring home a check.

Why is this? It’s because you’re headed into a make-or-break stage of your life when you hit college. The things you do there — even seemingly small things — will have an immense, life-altering effect on your future. And it’s maturity, not raw intelligence, that is your key to handling those situations successfully. You may be a wizard at literature or science or economics or whatever, but if you can’t handle the pressures of the world, you’re likely to flame out and not meet the goals you have for yourself right now.

As scholarship judges, we don’t want to give money to people who are going to flame out. We want to give money to the ones who are going to make it. Hence, we look for and place great value on maturity. Got it? OK.

So, how do we tell who’s mature and who’s not? Well, it’s an inexact science, to be sure. But one of the hallmarks of maturity in young people is their ability to balance their own big ideas with the knowledge that the world is complex, and that they still have a lot to learn. The world is a complex place, and solutions to society’s most difficult problems are hard to find. That doesn’t mean you can’t help solve them someday; it just means that, if we’re talking about a real problem, it’s not going to be easy to solve.

With that in mind, if you catch yourself writing overly simplistic phrases such as, “If more people would just…” or “The world would be a better place if we would just wake up and realize,” remember that the problems you’re talking about probably don’t have solutions as simple as you think. I’m not positive, but few major problems have ever been solved by a collective bunch of folks all spontaneously “waking up and realizing” anything. Your scholarship judges are educated and know this all too well. Preachy proposals will likely lead to some eye-rolling when your essay is being read, and that’s not good for you.

Scholarship Screwup #7: Give No Details

Judge Josh — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 06:01:52 +0000

Over the past two days, I’ve written about how school activities alone aren’t enough to win you scholarships, and that worried some of you quite a bit. Fear not, friends: today we’re continuing yesterday’s discussion of how to beef up those scholarship applications and cash in on the mistakes of your classmates. Here’s a huge but simple tip:

Brevity is good. Withholding key details is bad.

Talk about what you’ve actually done – not just the groups you’ve joined. Sure, you were in your church’s youth group. And you can put “Four years in my church youth group” in your application if you want. But if you do that, you’re not telling me much. Since I haven’t been to your church, I don’t know what your church’s youth group does. For all I know, you could be building full-scale models of Noah’s Ark and doing research at the Dead Sea, or you could all be taking a one-hour nap every Sunday. I have no idea. You have to tell me.

Set yourself apart, then, by talking about what you did over that time. Let’s say you spend four years in your church youth group serving meals to the homeless one day a week in a soup kitchen. Maybe you served an average of 150 people on each of those days in the soup kitchen (it’s OK to give an honest estimate — you’re not expected to be exact on matters like this). There are 208 weeks in four years, and that means you served 31,200 meals to homeless people during high school.

Now that’s impressive. But I’d have never known about it if all you put on your scholarship application was “Spent 4 years in church youth group,” now would I? If you want us to know you’re industrious, you have to tell us what you’ve done. That makes the difference between a boring, commodity essay and one that makes the committee’s eyes pop.

Scholarship Screwup #6: Forget About Family

Judge Josh — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 06:01:41 +0000

Yesterday I wrote about how school activities alone weren’t enough to win you scholarships, and that sent some of you into a panic. Seems many readers have been banking quite heavily on those school activities to win you some money. Not to worry: Today and tomorrow, we’re addressing how to beef up those applications and cash in on the mistakes of the other 99% of your classmates. You don’t have to cure cancer or stop global warming to win a scholarship — you just need to have a little more information than your classmates. And thanks to these emails, you’re going to have a LOT more. Here are two tips that will kick your scholarship applications into high gear and leave your friends in the dust (sorry, friends, but it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there).

Blood is thicker than water. Capisce?

Don’t forget your family. I know that we on the scholarship committees miss some incredible stories every day when our applicants write scholarship essays and mention absolutely nothing about the role they play in their own families. Let me say this clearly: your role in your own family is not as important as your school activities – it’s MORE important. Hey, let’s be honest: School will be over in a few years, but your family is around forever. Members of the cheerleading squad or the football team or the science club will forget your name in 10 years (trust me, it’s true — I’ve been to class reunions), but your family never will.

Probably the biggest crying shame in the entire world of scholarships is that, for years, thousands of excellent students have been passed over for scholarships. They are the students who have had no time to participate in extracurricular activities because they had to care for their families or work paying jobs to do so. Worse yet, those students are made to feel like they shouldn’t even apply, because they’re not “active” enough.

That’s the biggest and most unfair load of garbage I’ve ever heard, and don’t let anyone sell it to you. If you’re so busy with family responsibilities that you can’t involve yourself in student organizations, then you may just have a stronger application than those who do. But remember: We can’t give you credit for your family responsibilities if you don’t tell us what they are! So by all means, if it’s applicable to you, go into detail about how you spend time doing things for your family.

In the particular case of our company’s scholarships, we’ve always given heavy weight to “work ethic,” and that’s as applicable to those who work hard in their homes and at paying jobs as it is to those who work hard on the varsity field or inside the school walls. Our unwavering advice for scholarship essays is this: Tell your story, regardless of where it takes place.

Scholarship Screwup #5: Ignore the World Outside High School

Judge Josh — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 06:00:10 +0000

The average scholarship applicant lists a truckload of school-sanctioned activities in which he/she has participated over the four years of high school. Sports teams, clubs, projects, competitions, etc. This can only be a good thing, right? After all, that’s what your parents and counselors have been telling you all along — the more stuff you participate in, clubs you join, activities you do, etc., the more well-rounded student you appear to be. And that’s all true, but it’s not the end of the story.

These people are trapped in high school. You are not.

Frankly, school-related activities on their own just aren’t enough to grab a scholarship committee’s attention anymore. In addition to these common activities, you’ve got to go beyond the high school stuff if you want to grab the big scholarship bucks. Here’s why: The Internet has opened scholarship opportunities up to thousands of applicants who wouldn’t have been competing with you for this scholarship 10 years ago. And that means the less unique your essay is, the more likely it is that you’ll be passed over for the scholarship.

And about 99% of the application essays that students are writing these days talk about nothing but common high-school stuff: sports teams, clubs, groups — basically, I’m talking about any group they take a picture of for the yearbook. If there’s nothing but “high school stuff” in your essay, it’ll just be part of one big blur to the scholarship committee, and it’ll end up in the trash. They see literally hundreds of essays come in with that same stuff in them every single day. Not even a scroll of AP classes and high SAT scores are going to set you significantly apart from your competitors.

So does that mean you’re a loser, you and your four years of science club, soccer team, dance team, school play and varsity band? Of course not — that’s all great stuff and you should be glad you did it. But on its own, it’s not going to win you much scholarship money. The cold reality of the Internet age is that you’ve got to go beyond the ordinary to win big money — and, sadly, four years chock full of school activities is now considered ordinary.

You’ll have to dig for something deeper, better, more unique.

How, you say? Keep your pants on…that’s tomorrow’s topic.

Scholarship Screwup #4: Give Us Some Vague, Self-Absorbed Plans for Your Future

Judge Josh — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:22:10 +0000

A rule of thumb in scholarship essays (and life, if you will) is that it’s better to be specific than to be vague. Society is accustomed to using vague labels for people and what they do: student, businessman, housewife, factory worker, etc. These labels are convenient for the normal “small-talk” conversations that fill our daily lives.

Nothing wrong with wanting tons of money. You may want to tell the committee something different, though.

But your scholarship committee is a different audience. We want to know what’s different about you, and how you stand out from the millions of other people in this country alone who call themselves “students.” Even among those who have specific plans for their lives, there are big differences, and in a scholarship competition, it’s up to you to give the judges details about what you actually plan to be doing in the future, rather than just dropping a label on yourself. Let’s consider the example of students who aspire to be doctors.

If you tell the scholarship committee that you want to be a doctor, that sounds pretty good. If you say that you want to be a doctor who performs research that leads to new drugs to reduce the effects of Alzheimer’s, or that you want to work to improve dental health among inner-city children, or open a practice in the country in order to improve elderly care in under-served rural areas — that sounds exceptional.

The more specific you are, the more your essay is going to resonate with the committee, and it’s not hard to see why. Saying you want to be a doctor is nice, but it just doesn’t mean a lot unless you say why you want to be a doctor and what you’ll be doing once you’re in that career.

And now, on to the second part: It’s a good idea to talk about your future plans in terms of how you’ll be helping others. If you plan on becoming a teacher or a nurse or another job that’s strongly associated with community service, then this will be pretty easy; however, your future plans don’t have to be 100% charity work in order to do this effectively. Well-compensated professionals of all types are responsible for helping people in countless ways.

Of course, there’s an elephant in the room here that we need to acknowledge. For a great many people, the biggest (and sometimes only) reason for working toward a certain profession is the fat salary it promises. Many doctors and lawyers care less about helping people than having a Benz in the garage and a vacation house on the beach. In that case, I say — more power to you, and I hope you get it all! (If you do, please remember little old me who helped you get there). But when it’s time to write about your career aspirations on your scholarship application, then you should lie.

Lie? Yes, lie. Remember again — this is not an article about morals and ethics. It’s about how to win. And in this case, honesty is not the best policy.

What’s wrong with expressing a desire to make a good honest buck? I mean, isn’t the desire to get rich at least part of the legendary American Dream? Yes indeed — I’m right there with you (hey, I don’t give my book away for free, do I?). But let’s have a practical moment here: Who’s reading these scholarship essays and deciding whether you should win?

You guessed it — mostly teachers and other education professionals. And as you know, teachers don’t exactly make boatloads of money. They gave up any dreams of big paychecks when they chose a more service-oriented, feel-good job. So a lust for money and material possessions is not going to resonate terribly well with these people.

Remember: Scholarship judges are normal people, and it’s normal to gravitate toward people whose interests are similar to your own. Therefore, we can assume that teachers will tend to empathize with students for whom wealth is secondary to service. If that doesn’t describe you, then do your best acting job, at least until you’re done with your application.

Until next time, good luck!

Scholarship Screwup #3: Cry Me a River

Judge Josh — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:19:24 +0000

Hardships: We all have them, right? If you read as many scholarship applications as I do, you’d certainly think so. With college costs spiraling upward every year and families pinched for cash to pay for it all, students are going all-out to make sure the committees understand how rough they have it. But the truth is, we don’t all have hardships. We’re all busy, we all have pesky annoyances and long to-do lists, that’s for sure. But we don’t all have true hardships. Let me clarify the difference:

Zip it, kid.

* If your parents were killed when you were a baby and you were raised in an orphanage, that’s a unique hardship. If you were raised in Suburbia and had to share your 2,600 square-foot house with three wild and crazy brothers, that’s not.

* If you had to get a job at age 8 to help your family pay rent, that’s a hardship. If you had to get a job at 16 to pay for your first car, that’s not.

* If you were hit by a BMW and finished your senior year telecommuting from the intensive care unit, that’s a hardship. If you had to take a part-time job at the hospital to fix the body damage you did to your BMW by hitting that other person, that’s not.

Making sense yet? If you mention a hardship in your scholarship application, be sure it’s really a hardship. One thing you’ve got to remember when you’re applying for scholarships is that scholarship committees receive thousands of essays every week from students with thousands of different backgrounds, many of whom come from Third World countries in Africa and Asia. Some have led extremely difficult lives and have overcome obstacles so outlandish that Americans can’t even comprehend them. These are the type of stories that scholarship judges are accustomed to reading. By comparison, American student essays sound a little, well, spoiled and whiny. Here are a couple of examples of people with actual hardships vs. people who are just very busy:

Britney from Eden Prairie: “After running 3-5 miles every night at track practice, sometimes my body is so exhausted when I go home that I can barely finish my homework without falling asleep at my desk.”

Bungu from Ethiopia: “After running seven miles to get to school in the morning, I am so exhausted that I can barely stay awake. If we had desks, I would fall asleep in mine, but we don’t; we study on the cold dirt floor.”

Molly from Oak Park: “As a senior, of course, I have an extremely hectic schedule. Of course I’m in school all day Monday through Friday, but on Tuesday and Thursday nights I have advanced piano lessons for 90 minutes as soon as I get home from school, on Wednesdays I have church group and I work the breakfast shift at Burger King on Saturdays and Sundays. I endure this difficult life because I know that it will pay off in the end.”

Mbutu from Eritrea: “On Tuesdays, I walk 12 miles to the refugee camp at sunrise to receive our large bag of rice and flour from the U.N. so that my village can eat. Because the bag weighs 45 pounds, it takes all day and night Wednesday to return home with the bag. On Thursday, I pass out from exhaustion while my neighbors begin to cook flatbread for the children…” And so on.

If it sounds like I’m making light of other people’s misery, I’m not. These are pretty much spot-on descriptions of some of the essays I’ve read. So if you haven’t had to overcome insurmountable odds, that’s fine — that’s the case for most of us lucky enough to be born in the in the United States, at least. But don’t go overboard trying to convince the committee that your life is truly difficult if, in fact, it’s really only busy.

Now, a point of clarification: This doesn’t mean that just because you weren’t orphaned by Sudanese warlords at age 9 that you can’t win a scholarship by talking about any challenges you’ve met. You can and should talk about those challenges. Judges love to hear about challenges overcome. Just keep your perspective and resist the urge to call these challenges “hardships” or something similarly melodramatic, because trust me — we’ve read about every imaginable type of hardship, and we know and appreciate the definition of the word.

Until next time, good luck!

Scholarship Screwup #2: Bore Me With Your GPA

Judge Josh — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 19:15:56 +0000

Nothing angers the high-ranking students (and their teachers) more than this one, but I’ve some bad news for you, and you’re not going to like it. Are you sitting down? OK, here goes:

A good GPA is nice. But scholarship judges don't pay much attention to it.

Your GPA doesn’t really matter that much, {!firstname_fix}. If at all.

It’s ok, I’ll give you a minute to let it sink in.

Now, here’s why this is true:

A nationwide grade-inflation epidemic over the last 10 years has killed the significance of a high GPA. Thousands of pages have been written on this topic over the last 10 years, and I won’t rehash them all here. But I’ll summarize:

At some point in the recent past, someone decided that the horror of seeing the letter “D” or “F” on a report card did much more long-term damage to a kid than, say, not knowing how to read, write or spell. Lots of parents agreed, and convinced schools that even though Johnny still doesn’t know what a comma is, he still deserves a B in English.

Anyhow, the point is this: Nowadays, just about everyone has a GPA of 3.0 or above. Everyone. So what, you say? Well, that means if everyone has a similar GPA, then nobody’s GPA matters anymore. That’s it, plain and simple – if everyone’s GPA is the same (or close), what’s the point of even looking? Yes, but: I can hear it already:

“Yes, but today’s students are smarter than ever! Classes are more advanced, students are better prepared, and their achievements get more outstanding every day. It makes sense that the GPAs are higher.”

It’s absolutely true about the students being smarter than ever, and the achievements are greater, and all that. The stuff that today’s top students know and master and achieve is just mind-boggling. Considering the latest generation has been pushed harder than ever – and earlier than ever – by parents to achieve great things, it’s no surprise. But that just proves the point: if the best students are even better today than before, then why does everyone look the same on paper? If it weren’t for the grade inflation phenomenon, the top students would stick out more; but as it is, they simply don’t.

And last but not least, the quality of education in our country varies so widely that a 4.0 student (or, in some cases, a 5.0 or higher) at one school might flunk out at another. It also works the other way; a solid B-C student at a rigorous academic high school may have the brains to blow through the system with a 4.0 or better at a weaker school.

Thousands of students apply for our scholarships every month, and almost every one has a GPA of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale. That’s fine; it’s certainly better than having a GPA of 1.0 or 2.0. But one phenomenon remains the same: when nearly every applicant shares a particular characteristic, then that characteristic becomes unimportant – and that’s the story with GPA. It’s a commodity now. Are we saying not to include your GPA? Not necessarily, especially since many scholarships require you to report it. But don’t dwell on it in your essay, or expect it to carry you to a scholarship victory. It won’t.

Until next time, good luck!

Scholarship Screwup #1: Thrust Your Religion and Politics Upon Me

Judge Josh — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 18:25:25 +0000

I almost didn’t include this tip, but it’s one that every applicant needs to hear. Unless the scholarship you’re applying for is sponsored by an explicitly political or religious organization, you have almost no chance of winning if you write an essay “taking a side” on controversial issues like abortion, affirmative action, the Iraq war or any other polarizing issues. Why not, you ask? Surely it takes guts and conviction to write such an essay, no?

Feel free to rant about politics and religion all you like -- in a soundproof room, by yourself.

Yes, it does. And let me be the first to say that I’ve got a ton of admiration for people, students and otherwise, who stick to their convictions and lay their neck out on the line with an unpopular opinion, regardless of who it might offend.

However, I didn’t write my book or start this website to tell you how to speak your mind. I wrote it to show you how to win money from a group of people who will sit in judgment of you and thousands of your peers (hey, we’re called judges for a reason). And I submit to you that essays about contentious issues usually don’t win.

More practically, consider this very basic truth: the more contentious the issue you choose to write about, the more likely it is that one or more committee members will completely disagree with you. Divisive issues divide, and in all likelihood, you’ve got no idea who’s even judging your scholarship application, let alone the personal and political beliefs of those people. But if a judge happens to hold beliefs that run counter to the ones in your essay, should that affect their judgment?

In a perfect world, absolutely not. But we don’t live in a perfect world, and if you happen to find one, email me and I’ll meet you there for margaritas for the rest of eternity. Remember that committee members are people just like you and me. They try to keep their emotions and personal beliefs out of their decisions, but it doesn’t always work.

Offend them with the content of your essay and you probably won’t win the scholarship. Again – I’m not saying it’s right, but that’s just how it is. It’s real life, it’s unfair, and that’s how it goes. Rather than pretending otherwise, I’m advising you to acknowledge this reality and go the safe route with safe topics when you have a choice.

Outlaw Student » 10 Scholarship Screwups

The $150,000 Scholarships That Aren’t on Fastweb

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Scholarship Screwup #10: Act Like You’ll Starve If You Don’t Win

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Scholarship Screwup #9: Bore Me With Irrelevant Crap

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Scholarship Screwup #8: Preach To Me

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Scholarship Screwup #7: Give No Details

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Scholarship Screwup #6: Forget About Family

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Scholarship Screwup #5: Ignore the World Outside High School

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Scholarship Screwup #4: Give Us Some Vague, Self-Absorbed Plans for Your Future

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Scholarship Screwup #3: Cry Me a River

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Scholarship Screwup #2: Bore Me With Your GPA

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Scholarship Screwup #1: Thrust Your Religion and Politics Upon Me

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