How to Write a Personal Statement for Scholarships

When you’ve found a scholarship you want to apply for, make sure to do your research. If it’s a private scholarship, scour the company’s website. Often, you’ll find the essays from past winners on there. Take note of the themes you see repeated in previous winners’ essays. Even if they don’t post previous winners’ entries, look at the company’s mission statement. Make sure that what you plan to write aligns with the company’s goals. Sometimes the prompt will make it seem like you should give your open and honest opinion on a topic, but in reality, the judges have a right answer in mind. If you are applying to a scholarship at your school, the tips above still hold true. However, you want to make sure that your scholarship application adds to the readers’ image of you in a way that your school application does not. Again, look at your school’s website and find the words that they use all of the time. Some common ones are “community,” “leadership,” and “knowledge.” Focus on how your life and stories align with the information you researched on them.

Write down every idea that comes to mind, no matter how trivial it seems. I like to make bulleted lists and make some sub-bullets under those. Also, do this over the span of 2-3 days. Sometimes, you won’t have an idea when you’re staring at a blank document, but you will when you go about your day-to-day life. When you can, connect various ideas that you come up with when you’re brainstorming. I entered an essay contest that asked me to write about the Constitution, and I made it into a crochet metaphor. Seriously, anything goes, just write it down. You never know what you could come up with when you give it some time.

Now that you have an outline, you can start actually writing. My number one piece of advice is do not try to edit and write your first draft at the same time. Your first draft probably won’t be very good, and that’s okay. You need to have something to edit before you can make it better. I like to use Squibler’s “The Most Dangerous Writing App.” It will force you to just keep typing with minimal editing or it deletes your work up until that point. Only when you have your first draft, then you can start editing. Start with big-picture stuff. Does this flow well? Is it organized logically? Do you maintain a consistent tone? Did you fully answer the prompt? Read your essay aloud to make sure it sounds right. Hopefully you took care of most of these issues in your outline, but you should go through a few drafts looking at these issues before you start toying with specific word choices and grammar. Don’t start making little changes when you might just end up deleting the whole paragraph. I also recommend taking 1-2 days between editing your drafts so that you can look at it with “fresh” eyes each time. This way, you can catch issues that may not have been obvious to you beforehand. When you’ve done all of this, you’re ready to submit! Check over your work to make sure it’s free from basic spelling and grammar mistakes, and just generally make sure you’re happy with it. Congrats! You’ve submitted your scholarship application!

A lot of scholarships ask you to answer very similar prompts. You’ll see several asking about your career/educational goals, how you’ve overcome hardship, or how you’ve impacted your community. It is okay to reuse old essays to do this. I would caution against submitting the exact same essay to several different scholarships. You should be tweaking each of them to align more with the information you found in your research stage. However, if you can write a few really solid essays, you can increase your chance of earning more money. I won a local scholarship with an essay about community, and I tweaked it to enter (and win!) another scholarship competition by just making the language more broad. This will save you some time and energy as you’re trying to pay for school.