Scholarships: Don't Take Them For Granted!

The university application season is a stressful time for any senior high school student. On top of balancing high marks and extracurricular activities, we must think of our future too. One key aspect of our future is the necessity for financial stability, and university tuitions can make that difficult. Luckily, there are countless scholarships available to apply for and get funding from, but it isn’t easy to acquire one! This Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend Tomiwa Ademidun’s Think Tank on the “Importance of Scholarships” as a part of the Associate National Lead program and was exposed to a number of new viewpoints and perspectives. Many students are discouraged from applying for scholarships because of the difficulty of acquiring one, so they miss out on an important opportunity to receive funding for their education. I am glad that Tomiwa took the time today to speak with us regarding the importance of scholarships and how to apply for one.

There are important 3 pillars to submitting a successful and amazing scholarship essay:

Find:

The first step is to research and find scholarships. Many universities have entrance scholarships which can be completed after you have applied to the school. However, other scholarships can be much harder to find.

Tomiwa is the founder of Atila, an organization that helps students find scholarships, and creates lots of content to have information readily available for students to use for their education, career, and life in general. Searching for scholarships using the Atila website proved to be super useful, and I have used this website and already made a short list of scholarships I will be applying to in the near future.

Write

Since many people want and need financial aid, the applicant pool for scholarships is quite competitive. Making your application stand out is the most difficult part, but Tomiwa shared several steps you should follow to construct a cohesive and unique essay:

• When giving examples, make sure you supply them with proof. Make the proof as specific as possible, and tailor it to your own authentic experiences.

• If you are unsure of how the formatting is done, read up on past winners and see what they did to achieve the award.

• In terms of length, a general rule of thumb is “as long as necessary, as short as possible”; scholarship officers read numerous of these essays, so they will skim over it if the essay is too long, or does not have enough breaks or spaces between paragraphs. Finally, use online resources such as Grammarly and Paraphraser to assist you in writing your essay. These online tools will catch any grammatical errors you make to ensure your writing is as clear as possible.

Manage:

While writing the essays, ensure it is done in a word processing program such as Google Docs so your work will be saved to the Cloud. Not only will this prevent any breakdowns from watching your hard work being erased due to the session timing out, but you can then refer back to these essays in future scholarship and university applications.

Additionally, pay attention to the deadlines and manage your time accordingly. Give yourself plenty of time to complete the scholarship application, and keep track of your progress. Atila has an online browser extension that allows you to record the application deadlines and will remind you of an upcoming one.

Applying for scholarships can be a daunting task, but following Tomiwa’s advice, I feel a lot more confident in my ability to tackle these applications!