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Video: Tips for the Scholarship Application – Millennium Excellence Awards

Series: Tips for the Scholarship Application
Name: Millennium Excellence Awards
Length: ~31 minutes
Requires: Adobe Flash Player
Important Links: Scholarship Website, Application Form

NOTE: It may take a minute or two to load depending on your browser.

Additional Info. on the Challenging Task / Project Essay

I had a bit of a brain fart when thinking about good examples to use for this section during the video (see the pause when I start talking about “designing a machine” =P). But to be clear, I’m not saying that you need to have discovered a potential treatment for attacking cancer cells or anything to that degree to do well in this section (I surely didn’t have an example like that!) – it was just an example of a science project that was in my head at the moment. Any type of science fair project or business you’ve created would be good examples, along with many other things.

The key thing to realize is that you want to talk about a challenge that is relevant to the Millennium application – so your challenge should deal with leadership, innovation, and/or community service. So while a personal hobby like learning to play the guitar might technically answer the question, I don’t think it would be a strong answer. The reason why a science project, for example, works better is that although conducting a novel science project is also a type of hobby, successful science projects are usually original and innovative to some degree – so it is at least relevant to a criteria of the Millennium scholarship.

Questions?

If you have any further questions about the Millennium Excellence Awards, please leave a comment, and I will do my best to answer them!

Scholarship Interview Advice: Loran Award

A lot of people have been asking me about advice for the Loran Award regional interviews that are coming up in a few weeks. I decided to compile a lot of the things I have been telling students into an article here. Keep in mind that I did not move on to nationals when I went through these interviews two years ago.

NOTE: I’m not claiming to know anything in detail about the selection process or how the judges are trained to assess the applicants, so this is just my opinion, and you should take it with a grain of salt.

Regional Interview Structure

This is the structure for the regional interview I had in fall of 2005. It could have changed since then, but I highly doubt it.

The students in each region were divided into groups of about 10 students. Each group was associated with a panel of four judges.

In the morning you have two 15 minute interviews, each of them a 1-on-1 with a judge from your panel.

You then have lunch with a third judge from your panel, along with one or more of the other semi-finalists from your group.

In the afternoon you have a 15-20 minute interview with all four judges on your panel – so there’s one judge you won’t meet until the final panel interview.

I’m not really sure how the selection process goes from there, but I would imagine something like two students from each group move on to nationals, but I’m not really sure.

Interview Questions

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Video: Tips for the Scholarship Application – Queen’s Major Entrance Awards

Series: Tips for the Scholarship Application
Name: Queen’s Major Entrance Awards
Length: ~38 minutes
Requires: Adobe Flash Player
Important Links: Scholarship Website, Application Form

NOTE: It may take a minute or two to load depending on your browser.

Additional Info. on the Creativity / Original Thinking Section

I have been asked about whether doing a collage (like I did) is still a good or bad idea. I think doing a collage is a great idea, and I wouldn’t worry too much about other people doing something similar. However, I think it’s really important that you have a theme or concept behind the collage itself – that is, while there is some creativity involved in the way you construct the actual collage, I think the even greater creativity comes from the theme/idea behind it. And I would say the same thing goes for whatever medium you use for this section, be it a collage or not.

For example, for my collage, I called it “The Artist” because I wanted to convey the idea/theme that humanity is inherently artistic and creative, and so all of us are artists in our own right, despite the traditional themes normally attributed to the idea of an artist. That is, that athletes, for example, are just as much artists of their craft as painters are. That I’m not an artist because I draw and paint, but I am an artist because I am human. While I’m sure the judges liked my collage, I think they were more impressed by the deeper meaning I had behind it.

So as long as you have some important theme (a theme that should be obvious, unless you plan on writing a paragraph like I did), I think doing any type of collage is fine – and given that you have to do this on the paper, a collage might generally be one of the easier and better ideas.

Questions?

If you have any further questions about the Queen’s Major Entrance Awards, please leave a comment, and I will do my best to answer them!

Essay Writing: The Importance of Writing with a Purpose

I am sure there are many extremely qualified candidates for medical school. In fact, I think there are probably significantly many more people who would make fantastic physicians than there are spots. And in some cases, I think it is possible for some of the most promising physicians to not get into medical school.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: for any admissions process, be it a scholarship, professional school, or job, it’s not the best or most deserving candidates that get selected – it’s the candidate who does the best at the admissions process. It’s the candidate who markets himself or herself the best, and makes the evaluators think he or she is the best candidate.

About a month ago, the day before Ontario medical school applications was due, a close friend of mine was busy typing up one of his admissions essays. He was really worried about it, as he thinks he’s not very good at these, so he asked me to take a look at it and provide some advice. My friend is super intelligent, and I think that he would make a fantastic physician. This essay could be the make it or break it part of his application, and despite how good of a physician he might possibly be, this essay is the one of the few pieces of evidence the admissions committee has to come to that conclusion themselves.

So I read his essay, and I could instantly see a few problems in the writing process that he had, and it is a problem I am sure many students make when writing admissions or scholarship essays.

Anecdotes

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How to Write a Winning Scholarship Essay – Part 4: Revising the Essay

Congratulations on finishing the most gruelling part of the application process – writing the essay. Although the finish line is in sight, you’re not just done yet. But before we go on any further, there is one very important thing you need to do first.

Take a Break: Come Back in a Day or Two

Yes, you heard me right. Put down your pen. Get off your computer. Go outside, call up some friends, or even grab some homework to do. Whatever you do though, don’t read your essay for at least a day.

Why?

You have just been through a fairly intensive thinking and writing process. At this point, your mind is very exhausted, and it is unlikely you will be able to think straight. Not only do you deserve a break, but you need one. You are not going to be able to revise your essay properly if you’re not in a good state of mind.

In fact, because you have been drilling certain ideas into your head recently, you are going to have a very biased point of view about your essay. Sentences that normally would not make sense to you, all of a sudden appear perfect in your essay. Ideas that would usually clash, now seem to magically flow well. Don’t fall into this trap. Take a break!

Rested? Okay, Let’s Do One Personal Revision

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Mastering Interview and Application Questions: The Art of Questioning the Question

I was sitting in my Advanced Biochemistry class the other day, and the professor was talking about a well-known scientist (that I can’t remember) who helped pave the way for some very important discoveries in biology. The professor said that the reason why the scientist was so successful was not because he knew all the answers right away, but because he knew the right questions to ask.

Asking the Right Questions

Whenever you are solving any type of problem, the first thing you need to ask yourself is: what is the question really asking? Because if you don’t understand the question, then you’re never going to get the right answer. And the best way to understand a question, is to question the question itself (this sounds kind of tricky, but really it’s not!).

Being able to look at problems by asking the right questions is an important concept that applies to anything, and is something I find particularly useful in my undergraduate life sciences studies. Last year, I began tutoring first year chemistry students as part of the chemistry department’s peer mentoring program. Students would come in with chemistry problems they were having trouble with, and we would help figure them out.

While some of the other tutors just solved the problems for the students in front of them (and granted, that’s all some of the students wanted), I don’t feel this is the best way to help the students. Because if the students knew how to approach correctly, well, they wouldn’t need to be asking for help in the first place. So in general, I don’t like just solving the problems for them. What I try to do is guide them through the process of answering the question, and I do so by asking them questions. I ask them the questions they should be asking themselves while doing the problem.

I ask the students things like: What is the question asking us to figure out by the end? What information do we need to figure that out? Okay, so once we have that information, how do we get to the next step? etc. etc. When I do this, my hope is that the students retain this questioning method of problem solving. At some point, when this process becomes ingrained in you, you don’t really think about the questions consciously while say doing a test, but it’s essentially what you are doing while problem solving.

So What are the Right Questions to Ask when Approaching Interview and Application Questions?

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How to Write a Winning Scholarship Essay – Part 3: Writing the Essay

At this point, you should know what you are going to write. That is, you should have completed the outline for your essay which includes all the information and ideas you want to get across to the scholarship judges: what you have achieved, the lessons you’ve learned, how you got started, etc.

In this article, I am going to walk you through some important concepts on how to put these ideas into the form of an essay in the best way possible. One thing I am NOT going to do is write the essay for you. If you came here expecting to see complete sample essays, then you’re in the wrong place. What I’m trying to do is teach you how to write your essay, and hopefully by the end of the article, you’ll realize why understanding these concepts is much more valuable than me simply giving you a template essay to use.

Don’t Write an Essay. Write Your Story.

Although we always use terms like “scholarship essays” or “essay answers”, realize that you’re not writing a formal essay for your history class. Think of your scholarship essay of more like a story. Your story.

Imagine you were writing a novel about yourself and your leadership/community experiences: what would you say? How would you say it?

There are a few reasons why you should write your scholarship essay as if you are telling a story, but the primary reason is because it helps you stand out. Scholarship judges must go through hundreds or thousands of application essays. Formal essays are not exciting by nature – but stories are. You want your scholarship judge, in the heap of a hundred boring formal essay answers, to be excited by something interesting for once: your story.

Think of your essay like a movie or a novel, where you are the hero in the story: a hero with a mission. Through your story, you want to convince the reader (the scholarship judge) to be on your side. It’s kind of like sports. Have you ever watched your favourite team compete in a championship game? How did you feel? What emotions went through you as you cheered for your team? That’s the feeling you want the judges to have about you.

By the end of the essay, you want the judge to be cheering for you, to want you to succeed. You want the judge to put down your application and think: “Wow, I need to meet this person!”

Write in the First Person

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Making Sense

Imagine you are a scholarship judge or admission committees, and you are analyzing an application. It could be a scholarship essay, medical school essay, or something similar. Despite the specific qualities you are looking for, there is always one underlying question whose answer will consciously or unconsciously sway your opinion:

“Does it make sense?”

And I don’t mean grammatically (i.e. the sentences can be understood). For example, the medical school admissions committee might ask itself:

“Does it make sense for the applicant to become a doctor?”

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How to Write a Winning Scholarship Essay – Part 2: Planning the Essay

Now that you know how to think like a scholarship winner, it’s time to start writing like one. But we can’t just start writing, which is a big mistake I think some students make. Like anything important in life, you shouldn’t just jump head first into it. You need a plan.

As we learned in the previous article, you need to market yourself in a way that is conducive to the scholarship judges. So we need to learn how the judges are thinking, find what they are looking for, and emphasize those relevant qualities and experiences we have into our essays.

So how do we know what the judges are looking for?

Read the Scholarship Criteria Carefully

This should be obvious, but there are still students who don’t study this carefully enough. Most scholarships provide at least a few points or brief summary of the type of students they are looking for, both on the application form and on the website.

For example, the Loran Award states that their overall criteria are leadership, service, and character. In the application form, two of the three essays ask you to talk about a community service and leadership experience. As a result, most students just answer the questions normally, and hand in the application.

But hold on, there is a third criteria: character. In fact, the organization specifies the idea of “moral force of character”. What does this mean? If we do a bit of searching, we find a few character traits that are relevant: “honesty, integrity, courtesy, tolerance, maturity, and compassion”. Knowing this, we can then plan our essay to include specific experiences that emphasize some of these character traits, which is much superior to an essay which neglected them. These three criteria for the Loran Award were here for a reason, and ensuring that all three criteria were met in your essay answers is imperative.

So read the scholarship criteria carefully, and take advantage of all the information available. Make sure you address all of the criteria in your essays.

Read the Profiles of Past Winners

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How to Write a Winning Scholarship Essay – Part 1: Thinking Like a Scholarship Winner

By the time I had graduated from high school in 2006, I had won over $200,000 in scholarships. In the end I decided to accept the TD Canada Trust Scholarship for Community Leadership worth up to $60,000 over four years. In addition to that award, I was offered the Millennium National Scholarship, as well as the most prestigious scholarships from York University, Queen’s University, and the University of Western Ontario. All of these scholarships required applications and essays, and most of them also required interviews.

Before we delve into specifics about writing a great scholarship essay, it’s important that you understand the mindset of a winning scholarship student. The reason I was successful is largely due to my attitude and overall approach to the process.

It’s Not About Luck. It’s About Maximizing Your Chances

Most people would say that you need to be really lucky to win a major scholarship. So I guess you could say that I was extremely lucky to win so many. And it’s true, luck plays a role in winning scholarships – but it’s no different from the role luck plays everywhere else in life.

But it wasn’t just luck that allowed me to win as much as I did. It would be extremely unlikely for me to have been that successful on luck alone. It wasn’t coincidence that I was meeting the same students at a lot of my interviews. And it wasn’t chance that I know several students who won numerous major scholarships like I did.

And if you keep relying on the attitude that you need to be lucky to be successful, then you’re simply giving yourself an excuse from finding ways to improve your chances.

There is a Science to Writing a Winning Scholarship Essay

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