Scholarship Applications

For those of you that have already dealt with these, I’m sure you’ll agree with me that filling out a scholarship application ranks right up there with tax returns, mortgage documents, and FAFSA forms. Plus, there’s a lot riding on it. Making the right statements could have a significant impact on your student’s educational future. Submit an application that has typos and grammatical errors, and you may as well have just skipped it altogether.

Listed below are some tips to help your student navigate through the process of completing the application and essays.

Scholarship Application Tips

• Pay attention to deadlines. Applications submitted past the deadline are not considered.
  Prepare a resume. Not only is this good practice for the student as they venture closer to the world of a career, but also gives the student an opportunity to “showcase” their activities and achievements.
• Send more than asked for. It may help to provide additional materials, such as evidence of awards, additional activities, or writing examples. This will give the decision-makers a more complete picture of the student. If, however, there are explicit instructions to limit your submission to specific items, follow the instructions. Any additional information will be considered “clutter”.
• Prepare letters of recommendation. The student should cultivate the sources of these letters fairly early on in their career – so that when the scholarship deadline is looming, the letter-writer isn’t put under pressure to produce a letter on short notice. These letters are an important source of information for the display of character, personality, and specific talents.
• Essay writing. The student should make certain that the essay allows their personality to show. In addition to scholastic and academic achievements, it is important to showcase the well-rounded student, highlighting sports, club memberships, honors, achievements, volunteer and community work. It is also important to include personal vignettes, lessons learned, and information on financial need where applicable.
• Proofread. Nothing will come across with a greater negativity than a sloppy, poorly written, grammar and punctuation nightmare. Have at lease two other people review your application and especially your essay in order to find all the errors and correct them before submitting.
• Copies. Always keep a copy of everything that you submit. Things have a way of getting lost in the mail. Plus, if you’ve got a copy of what was sent, if there are questions on a portion of your submission, you can easily answer them from your copy. (By the way, this is a good practice for anything that you send anywhere. In today’s world of computers with scanners, there is simply no reason to ever be caught without a copy of a form you’ve sent somewhere.
• Thank You. It’s a good practice to get into: regardless of the outcome by the scholarship committee, the student should send a brief letter or card, thanking them for their consideration. In the event that the student receives the scholarship, a more formal letter of thanks would be quite appropriate.

Why Plan?

I am always advocating creating a plan for your financial life – but why plan? Maybe we can identify some factors which may motivate you to develop plans for your life, incorporating financial factors with the rest of your life.

Following are some of the more important factors that you may want to think about:

1. It is a way to prepare for the future. This fits in with one definition of planning, which is "intelligent cooperation with the inevitable."
2. Planning identifies problems and points the way to solutions. Taking a systematic, thorough look at the situation and thinking about the future possibilities can bring these things to light.
3. It helps us to do first things first. In other words, it provides a rationale for assigning priorities. Should we save more for retirement, or for college? Should we pay off our home mortgage?
4. Planning helps to coordinate your various goals with one another. For example, you need to make sure that adequate funds are being set aside for family vacations, while still putting aside funds for college and retirement.
5. Planning can educate, involve and inform you and your family about the various goals and situations that you have to account for within your financial world. Planning can be a real eye-opener.

Now, just so that you won’t think that this concept of planning is a new idea, I recently came across the following endorsement of the concept of planning:

“Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it? For if he lays the foundation and is not able to finish it, everyone who sees it will ridicule him, saying ‘this fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’

Or suppose a king is about to go to war against another king. Will he not first sit down and consider whether he is able with ten thousand men to oppose the one coming against him with twenty thousand? If he is not able, he will send a delegation while the other is still a long way off and will ask for terms of peace.”

In case you don’t recognize the quote, it is from the New Testament of the Bible (NIV), the book of Luke, chapter 14, verses 28-32. Obviously the concept of planning is important – considered by Jesus Christ to be what we call today a “no brainer”. That’s a pretty powerful endorsement, no matter how you look at it.

Hopefully these factors have helped you to understand the importance of planning – and that you are inspired to begin developing your own plan. Because your life will go according to “a” plan, you might as well make it “your” plan!

I Bet You're in This Group

This sort of puts things in perspective! If the population of the Earth was reduced to that of a small town with 100 people, it would look something like this:

There would be:
52 women
48 men

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 Americans (northern and southern)
8 Africans

70 people of color
30 Caucasians

Six people would own 59% of the whole world wealth and all of them will be from the United States of America.

80 would have bad living conditions
70 would be uneducated
50 underfed
1 would have a computer
1 (only one) will have higher education, (probably the one with the computer).

Also think about the following:

If there is a food in your fridge, you have shoes and clothes, you have bed and a roof, you are richer then 75% of the people in the world.

If you have a bank account, money in your wallet and some coins in the money- box, you belong to the 8% of the people on the world who are “well-to-do”.