A common essay prompt asks students how they’ve contributed to their community. Chloë Divers emphasized her community involvement and won the Mimi Soltysik Memorial Scholarship in October 2023. Chloë won $500 🥳! Check out Chloë’s winning essay and her scholarship tips for other students.
Zachary won a $250 local scholarship – the Houghton Kearney Elementary Alumni Scholarship – in the summer of 2023. Local scholarships are fantastic opportunities to win multiple, smaller scholarships for college. We asked Zachary to share his own scholarship experience with us.
The new golden child of tech is ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot that can parse complicated instructions to write anything from short banter, through to full-blown essays. As a result, school districts around the U.S. have already started banning the software/website on school computers, while more enterprising teachers find a way to incorporate the new tech into their lesson plans. We thought we’d put ChatGPT to the college admissions test: How would the AI fare when asked to fill out all the short responses & short essays in the Stanford college admissions application? Let’s find out.
So you’re applying for a scholarship that asks you about your financial need. What do you say? How honest or specific should you be? What is TMI? In this article, we break down how to pen an awesome financial need scholarship essay or statement.
When you’re applying for scholarships, you’ll see tons of different essay prompts. Two of the most common are “Why do you deserve this scholarship?” or its variant “Why are you applying for this scholarship?” While these might seem like intimidating questions, don’t overthink them! These are straightforward questions that you can easily answer. Here’s how.
Checking each scholarship application’s questions and essays can be time-consuming. But what if you could find out what the most common essay topics were–and then reuse those same scholarship essays across multiple applications? Well, Going Merry can help you do just that. We took a random sample of about 700 scholarship applications on our scholarship platform and categorized the prompts for any essays requiring 250 or more words. Finally, we ran the numbers to find out what the top 10 most common scholarship essay prompts are.
When it comes to paying for college, scholarships are the best form of financial aid, since they offer students free money that never needs to be repaid. But let’s face it: completing scholarship applications, especially the essays, can feel overwhelming. The scholarship essay is arguably the most important part of the application and should be well-thought-out. In this article, we’ll walk through five scholarship essay examples and explain why they worked, so that you can write your own winning scholarship essays.
Many scholarships require you to submit at least one essay – but you’re wondering: how should your essay be formatted? Should it be double-spaced or single-spaced? Should you include a title? Should you include the prompt? What does a typical scholarship essay format look like? Although you don’t have to worry about essay formatting at Going Merry (we’ll structure and submit your application for you, with our pre-filled forms!), maybe you’re also applying to some other scholarships too. So we’re here to help you understand how to format your scholarship essay.
You know yourself better than anyone else, but writing about yourself can still be tough! When applying for scholarships or to college, essay prompts can feel so general (and yet so specific!) that they leave us stumped. So we’ll show you 8 tips to write an essay about yourself, so that you can land more scholarships.
John reflected on his eagerness to learn since a young age, and how the sky was never the limit for him. He’s now on his way to a four-year university, setting an example for his younger siblings. We asked John to share tips for future scholarship applicants, and he shared his scholarship success story with us!
The scholarship application required an essay answering the following prompt: “Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.” Writing this essay gave Gabby the opportunity to reflect on and write about her experience in Germany and what she took back with her when returning to America. Since she won big, we asked Gabby to share tips for future scholarship applicants, and she told us her scholarship success story!
Have you ever opened up a scholarship application only to find that you have to write yet ANOTHER scholarship essay, this time about your academic goals? We get it. There’s a lot of writing involved when you’re applying! Well, we’re here to guide you through your academic goals essay, with scholarship essay tips and a template. We’ve even got a surprise for you at the end that will save you time on your scholarship applications.
Why is boasting about a best friend SO much easier than writing about yourself? Unfortunately, writing about yourself is exactly what a personal statement essay requires you to do–whether it’s for your college admissions application, or for a scholarship application to pay for college. Here’s our guide, to ensure you’re well-equipped to write a killer personal statement!
More and more scholarships allow you to submit short videos instead of personal essays. Check out the winning scholarship essay video entry from Violetta Spinazzola, about her best friend Jess. We asked Violetta about how she made the heartwarming video, converting the $8 she spent on royalty-free music, to a $1000 scholarship award for her friend Jess!
After you brainstorm the responses to these questions, look for common themes, or pick out the most interesting stories. You can build your main essay “thesis” or idea around this. Once you’ve got the main idea, create an outline to put your ideas into essay format. This will give you a general idea of structure. You can use the career essays template below to give you some ideas. But remember that some rules are meant to be broken, so don’t be afraid to be innovative and think outside the box!
Applying for scholarships would be a piece of cake if it wasn’t for the essay, which often forces us to reflect on ourselves, who we are as people, and what we’ve accomplished so far in life. While it can be the most difficult part of the application, it’s also the most important part.
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