What is OutlawStudent.com?

My name is Josh Barsch, and I’ve given away over $100,000 of my own money to scholarship recipients. I’ve started a few websites over the past few years to help students win scholarships, get jobs, improve their careers, get better financial aid, etc.

Among those sites are: GiveMeScholarships.com and GiveMeAResume.com, and all of the scholarship mini-sites within StraightForwardMedia.com.

I’ve now combined all those sites into this one, OutlawStudent.com.

I’m the CEO of StraightForward Interactive, and our company has been awarding scholarships for a long time now. I’ve been a judge for those scholarships since we began the programs in 2003, and I’ve read thousands upon thousands of scholarship applications. And, I’m sorry to say, most of them are pretty bad.

A vast majority of students (I’m talking over 90%, at least) make stupid mistakes that disqualify their essays almost immediately. At first, it made me laugh, but soon enough it became a little depressing. I’d have a stack of scholarship essays that would take me hours to read, and it was exhausting to think that only a handful of them would be winner material. To be honest, it also pissed me off at the educational system. Is there really no one out there teaching our high school students how to write an acceptable scholarship essay?

Apparently not. So I decided to do something about it. I wrote a short e-book on the subject, which was very helpful for the kids who bought it, but didn’t do much for the body of applicants as a whole. So I decided to put this website out there for everyone to use, for free.

So look around as much as you like — the info is free and here for you to use. If you would like a hard copy of all the info on this site, you can buy the book here. The navigation on the side provide links to all of our tips, and there are a lot of them. If you have questions or comments, just leave them as blog comments and I’ll answer them as soon as possible. Enjoy!