Scholarship Essay Prompts and Topics - Best Questions and Answers
Preparing a scholarship essay is always a significant step for a high school or college student. Your task is to impress the admissions committee and make your case stand out. To attain that goal, you must know what message to convey and the right way to do it. How to decipher scholarship essay questions and answer them? The action plan for this paper isn't that different from your average college essay.
- Study the given scholarship essay prompts and pick the one you like the most.
- Think about the experience you can use to make the writing interesting.
- Provide supporting evidence pertaining to your common scholarship essay topic.
- Create an outline to ensure a logical flow and a balanced structure.
- Write an essay example or two to avoid mistakes and come up with a top-notch paper.
An application scholarship committee needs much more than a simple essay to grant you a fund for education abroad or reward you for succeeding in the academic field. Hence, in this guide, we are going to focus on the most important element of your preparation. We offer you a collection of common scholarship writing prompts - here, we've gathered the most general aspects you can dwell on while writing. For each essay prompt, we've picked several ideas that may inspire you or help to formulate your own subject matter (if such an option is available).
Scholarship Essay Prompts for College
When working on this essay, you have a chance to express yourself and show that you deserve a scholarship - for your academic accomplishments, sports performance, artistic skills, etc. That is possible if you:
- Have well-developed writing skills and can apply them appropriately
- Prove your academic competence as well as critical and analytical skills
- Make your writing to be more than words - provide reliable facts and examples
- Know how to show your best qualities and prepare a distinctive work
Try to pick a topic in which you can combine all these aspects well. Keep in mind that this essay should resonate with your own beliefs and attitudes toward different issues. That will let the scholarship committee to assess your writing better and decide whether you deserve to be awarded.
Leadership Prompts
Your thoughts are focused on one particular question "how to win?". Therefore, the whole process reminds a competition, and you want to be the leader by any means. This essay question is good for demonstrating your perception of this phenomenon and presenting your skills as a leader. On the other hand, after reading your work, the committee members can see you like a really self-motivated and diligent student. Here are some questions and statements that may help.
- What is leadership for you? Do you consider yourself a leader?
- The time when I learned that being a leader isn't an easy task
- What are the leader's main objectives? What aim did I have as a "boss"?
- What makes a respected leader? How can they facilitate a team spirit?
- How to distinguish leadership and lording over?
- What kind of person can become a leader easily? Is it easy for me?
- How to raise a leader in oneself? Did my family raise me as one who leads?
The meaning of leadership may vary depending on your personality, and here, the including of your own experience in an essay plays a pivotal role.
Challenges as Scholarship Prompt
It would also be effective to include your responsible attitude to problems in the scholarship essay. Any education process is usually filled with various pitfalls, and it would be a good decision to prove that you can deal with all of them easily. Or, at least, you understand how to approach them reasonably. When writing an essay on challenges, you have a wide range of aspects to emphasize and consider. Therefore, here is a list of good scholarship prompts that guarantee you a triumph:
- My biggest challenge when I was a child.
- What is your absolutely winning strategy? Have you tried it?
- How the positive/negative challenge you've encountered affected you?
- Is there a "compulsory" challenge everyone should face? Have you faced it?
- Is it true that the hardest challenge is the one you create yourself?
- Is there a challenge you would like to face again?
- Do you agree with the idea that the only way to development is going through challenges?
When you want to write about something difficult you've faced and dealt with, emphasize your personal achievements, show an attitude to wins and failures, and prove your ability to think strategically. A good set of features for a scholarship applicant!
Prompts about Social Issues Around the Globe
There are scholarships where you can show your competence and interest in current events and social issues that are highly discussed. Here, you can describe particular aspects of life through the prisms of various societies or highlight certain problems looming over us. But, you can write not only about impactful or hazardous phenomena but emphasize the bright and positive sides of this topic. By adding facts from your experience and describing your own attitude towards different phenomena, you may express concerns about particular problems or highlight the joy of every day. Below, you will find some ideas that can be covered during your writing.
- Gender discrimination and domestic violence in developed countries
- Bullying and abuse in educational institutions and ways to prevent them
- Challenges of same-sex marriage and the role of the LGBTQ in social development
- Social issues we should solve now. Your actions toward its prevention.
- Racism and cultural appropriation as stumbling-blocks for social progress.
When preparing an essay on social issues, you can come up with different thoughts or efficient solutions. If your topic mentions a certain problem, just ask yourself, "Is there something I can do to solve it?" Such thoughts may inspire you to write.
Happiness and Sadness Prompts for Scholarship Essay
These two phenomena and their meaning will remain the biggest secret for humans. Everyone has their own interpretation of sadness and happiness that help to make life more fulfilled. You can be asked to write a scholarship paper on one of these matters since such a task will show your original way of thinking, imagination, and life priorities. That's what a scholarship committee needs to know about you. Here are some ideas:
- What do happiness and sadness mean to you?
- Should we be grateful for every day of your life?
- Does being a realist mean you will always be sad?
- Can money buy happiness or ease sadness?
- How do good people around make us happy?
- Do we create our happiness ourselves?
- Are the optimists luckier?
Now, a strong scholarship essay is what can make you happy, but is there any secret of a winning paper? Confidence, attention to detail, and persuasion. We hope our scholarship essay prompts for 2020 will be helpful, and your paper will impress anyone. Good luck with reaching your goals!