How to write a tell us about yourself scholarship essay

Tell us about yourself, five hundred words, and you have been at it for forty minutes. The three hundred words on the screen cover marching band, the summer at the garden center, your grandmother, and the plan to study engineering. Every sentence in it is true. Read start to finish, it comes out as your activities list with connective tissue between the entries, and you can feel that it is weak without being able to name what is wrong. So you rewrite the opening line for the third time, which changes nothing, because the opening line was never the defect.

The defect sits upstream of the writing. You were handed a question with no boundary in it and you answered the only way an unbounded question allows, which is by covering everything. No amount of work on the sentences repairs an essay that was assembled by coverage. The material has to be chosen before any of the prose is worth improving, and there is a criterion for choosing it that the prompt withholds and the reader applies anyway.

Every other prompt does the selecting for you

Look at what a normal prompt does for the writer. Ask a student to write about a time they led something and the question has already discarded most of their life, leaving them to choose among the three or four episodes that qualify. Ask about a challenge they worked through and the same thing happens in about a minute. The prompt carries its own filter, the student runs their memory against that filter, and a short list falls out. Most questions on a scholarship application work this way, which is why they feel hard to write well and easy to start.

This one carries no filter at all. Everything about you is admissible, so nothing arrives with a reason to be cut, and leaving an item out begins to feel like concealing it. What comes out is a summary weighted evenly across whatever you happened to remember while typing, and that summary is a format you already submitted. Your activities, your awards, your coursework and your intended major are sitting in structured fields on the same application. An essay that walks through them again spends the one open space you were given repeating the closed ones.

The half of the prompt nobody printed

The person reading your essay weighs it against the reason the money exists, which is a different question from the one printed on the form. It might be a memorial fund started by a family for students going into nursing, or a service club that funds graduates of three named high schools, or a company award attached to a field it wants applicants working in eight years from now. Whatever the case, somebody wrote that purpose down, and it usually sits on the same page as the application form, in the paragraph above the eligibility rules that students scroll past on the way to the deadline.

Read that paragraph before you choose any material. Then write one sentence for yourself, in plain language, describing who this fund was set up to support and what its founders were trying to produce. That sentence is the filter the prompt should have arrived with, it rules your candidate stories in and out, and it costs about four minutes to produce. The same paragraph tends to answer a second question worth settling before you write rather than after, since it tells you how well you match what the funder is looking for, and how to tell which scholarships are worth applying to works through how to weigh that against the hours an application takes.

Choose material only you could have written

With the filter written down, selection stops being a matter of taste. Themes make a poor starting point, because a theme produces the sentence about being passionate about helping people, which every applicant in the pile can write and none of them can support. Moments work better, and the useful ones have a date and a place attached, along the lines of the October morning you took the register because the manager's car would not start, or the summer you learned to read a soil test before you learned to drive, or the three months you took a bus across town twice a week and whatever you were doing at the other end of that ride.

Run every candidate through one test. Could another applicant from your school write this same sentence by swapping two nouns? If they could, what you have written is a category rather than a fact, and categories are invisible in a stack of applications where everyone is describing the same handful of them. Keep whatever survives, take the single item sitting closest to your sentence about the fund, and let the rest go without ceremony. One thread carried the whole way through is stronger at any word count than four threads introduced and abandoned.

The shape, and where the words should go

The shape that holds is three parts in order, starting with what happened, told concretely enough that a stranger can picture it, moving to what the episode changed about how you work or what you pay attention to, and ending with what it points at now, which is where any goals you have settled on belong. Most students invert the proportions, giving eighty words to the episode and four hundred to what it taught them, and the reflection is the part that reads the same from one application to the next. Give the episode the majority of the space, since the meaning of a story is far easier to accept once the reader can see the story.

Where goals appear, make them specific enough to be checkable. Wanting to help people in healthcare is a category again. Wanting to work in rural emergency medicine because the nearest hospital to your house is a forty minute drive is a plan, and it reads differently when the award was endowed by a family in a rural county. That kind of specificity is what makes an essay fit the award instead of merely mentioning it, and it is available to you only after you have read what the award is for.

Openings that spend thirty words on nothing

The announcement opening gives the committee your name, your grade and your school, all of which are printed on the form in front of them. The dictionary opening and the since-I-was-a-child opening are common enough by now that they carry no information about you whatsoever. Each of them costs the first thirty words of a five hundred word budget, and against a two hundred and fifty word limit that is an eighth of everything you have to work with.

Open inside the moment you selected, with a place, a time, and something happening in it. The reader lands in the scene immediately, and the sentence explaining why the scene matters can follow once the scene has earned the explanation. This is also the easiest part of the essay to fix late, which is why it makes such an appealing place to hide when the real problem is that the material underneath has not been chosen.

The same question is coming back in November

Some version of this prompt turns up on application after application, with the wording moved around and the limit changed. One form allows two hundred and fifty words, the next allows a full page, a third asks you to introduce yourself and describe your goals in six hundred. The material underneath stays the same across all of them, so the hours you spend selecting and drafting once will pay for themselves several times over, provided you can find the file again three months from now.

Write the long version first and keep it somewhere you have agreed never to overwrite, then cut copies down to each limit. Most students rewrite from nothing anyway, and the cause of that sits in retrieval rather than in the writing, which is the subject of storing scholarship essays by the question they answer. A folder named after the organization that asked records the one fact you will never search by, and the prompt itself, which is what you arrive holding every time, gets recorded nowhere.

Whose voice this has to be in

A question asking for an account of you puts a hard constraint on who is allowed to produce the words. A parent who writes the paragraph, or a model that generates one from a list of your activities, produces a competent essay about a person the committee will never meet. It also puts your signature under a certification, since applications generally carry a line stating the work is the applicant's own, and an award withdrawn after it has been announced is a worse outcome than never having placed. The boundary between useful help and authorship is more precise than most families assume, and where the line falls between helping and writing a scholarship essay works through where it is written down and how to stay on the right side of it.

Help that survives the constraint is all upstream of the page. Someone can ask you questions until the specific memory surfaces, tell you which paragraph they stopped believing, and point at the sentence that says nothing. Every word that ends up submitted still has to be written by you, and the questioning is where most of the value in outside help sits anyway, since a reader who was not there can see which parts of the story you left out because they were obvious to you.

The pass to run before you submit

Read your first sentence and confirm that something is happening in it. Then go paragraph by paragraph and delete each one temporarily. Any paragraph the essay survives without was summary, and it stays deleted. Check your final paragraph against the sentence you wrote about the purpose of the fund, since that connection is the thing the reader is looking for and the thing most often left implied. Then hunt for abstract self-description, meaning any sentence where you name a quality you possess rather than showing an occasion when you demonstrated it, and either replace it with the occasion or cut it.

Mechanics last. Confirm the length against the limit and against how the form counts, since a few of them count characters. Confirm that no sentence names a different organization, which happens constantly once you start reusing material. Read the whole thing out loud, because the sentence that has been quietly bothering you is the one you will stumble over.

Where this fits

Penny, the essay coach in Scholarship Ally, reads the draft you wrote, scores it, points at the strongest material already in it, and says specifically which sentences are weak and what to do about them, working from your About You profile and any documents you have uploaded so the coaching sits on your own material rather than on generalities. She will not write or draft a word of it, and the product will not go find awards for you either, since students add the scholarships themselves. The Answer Vault holds the answers that repeat across applications, which is where a selected and drafted version of this prompt belongs once you have one worth keeping. None of that is required for the process above, which runs perfectly well out of one document and a folder.

Before you touch the opening line again, open the award's page and write the one sentence about who the fund was set up for. The prose problem you have been working on all evening is downstream of a selection problem, and rewriting sentences will not resolve it. Once the filter is on paper, most of the three hundred words on your screen will be obviously wrong, and the four hundred that replace them will take less time to write than the ones you have been trying to save.