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It's Scholarship Season

It's Scholarship Season
1/25/2012
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Contributed by Guest Blogger Derrius L. Quarles, aka the MillionDollarScholar

Did you know that the months of January through April have more scholarship deadlines than all of the other months combined? That means this is the time to get off of your rump and compete for free money for college. If you haven’t started already, the things you should start working on are the four basic components of all scholarship applications:

  • Personal information
  • Scholarship writing (personal statement/scholarship essay)
  • Scholarship resume
  • Recommendations

If you have already started creating these components, that’s good...but you are not off the hook that easy! You want to now develop these components to the best possible quality before you submit any of your applications. It is best to start with the component that will take the most time and that is your writing (personal statements/scholarship essays). The greatest piece of advice I could give you in regards to your writing is to go back and check for two things: creativity and authenticity. When I say creativity I am talking about how you relay information to the reader. Have you ever heard someone say, “sometimes it's not what you say, it's how you say it”? That proverb is exactly what creativity in your essays is all about. You want to find small ways to make your writing unique and stand out from the crowd of other essays. I am not going to tell you specifically what you should do to make your essays more creative, because if I did, then it wouldn’t really be you that is being creative. That gets into my next point about writing: make it your own. You want to show the person or people reading your essays who you are. If you are passionate about something, I should be able to know that after reading what you wrote. If you have an idea about what you want to do for the rest of your life, make sure you show that. Lastly, complete three rounds (yes, I said three rounds) of editing where you check and correct small mistakes like missing and unnecessary punctuation or words, run-on sentences and misspelled words in all of your essays and online application content (academic info, activities, etc.). Skip over this last step only if you don’t like winning free money.

For your recommendations, you want to remember three things:

  • To give the person you are requesting a recommendation from two weeks in advance from the date you want the recommendation.
  • To have your scholarship writing and resume completed before you request the recommendation and give the person recommending you a copy of both
  • To request a recommendation from a person that can speak on your personal character as well as other qualities such as academic performance, community involvement, etc.

It takes a lot of time to put together an entire scholarship application and I am sure you may be thinking about all of the other work and activities you may have to do. Not to worry. This season there are some new resources around to assist you with your scholarship writing and resume. You can get free writing feedback at MillionDollarScholar.com, which is a recently released website full of information and tools to help students in the process of winning scholarships. The writing feedback will provide specific advice about how to make your writing better. To help you develop your scholarship resume you can utilize the Million Dollar Scholar Resume Builder. With this tool, you can input information online that can quickly be transferred to a Word document for resume creation. This tool has been specifically set up to help you provide the information and history that most scholarships will require.

Alright scholar, you now know that it is the season of free money. You have the information and you now know about a new resource to make the process less stressful. Do not let this scholarship season pass you by!

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