Recycling can help our planet by reusing old goods and creating brand new, useful items. You can also use a similar process when writing your essays for scholarships. The more time you save reusing older materials, the more time you’ll have to research and apply for scholarships that give you the best chance at getting free money for college and possibly minimizing the amount of student loan debt you’ll have.
Not only is this a great timesaving method, but it will also help you stay informed and organized throughout your scholarship search and application process. You can with these four easy steps.
1. Make a spreadsheet and get organized: Compiling information about the scholarships you’ve chosen to apply for is a good first step. That way, you have important information like due dates and eligibility requirements organized. If you’ve done a good job researching scholarships that match you, your interests and experiences, you should have fewer applicants to compete against.
You can also use the spreadsheet to determine if you’ll need to do further research into the scholarship. Once you start recycling your essays, you’ll need to know some more specific details in order to reuse your writing to create new, effective essays for each prompt or scholarship.
[Know what to do before, during and after the scholarship search.]
2. Understand the essay prompts: Chances are many scholarships will have different word length requirements and prompts that you will need to write on for your essay, so make sure you take note of what exactly is being asked.
If you don’t quite understand an essay question or prompt, ask a teacher, counselor, mentor or parent. Many scholarship committees will check to see if you have paid attention to the requirements and have written an essay that fully responds to the prompt . They want to see if you have followed directions.
Sometimes, you can also look at the scholarship provider’s website to see what the essays from past winners were like. This can increase your chances of winning by seeing exactly what the judges are looking for and different ways other students have interpreted the topic.
You may find that some scholarship essay prompts are similar. Consider grouping these together on your list. For example, you may have community service prompts, prompts that ask you about challenges you’ve overcome, etc. Later, when you are working on your essays, you’ll be able to use some of the same material to apply to these scholarships.
[Explore tips and resources about paying for college.]
3. Collect and organize your materials: There are many places where you can find “recyclable” essay materials. These might include personal statements, college application essays, resumes and even certain essays you wrote for class. Find anything that you might be able to use based on the prompts for the scholarships on your list.
Take a close look your writing and see if anything works for the prompts on your list. If you have spare copies, or can make them, take notes on sections that can be recycled to visit when you get down to starting your essays and take note of which scholarships fit with each section you will reuse.
[Target these scholarships for your senior year to-do list.]
4. Create new scholarship essays using old, recycled materials: Once you have matched your material with the corresponding prompts, start crafting your scholarship essays keeping in mind all of the research into the topics you’ve done.
While you might use some of the same writing for multiple essays, each essay should still be tailored to the scholarship you are applying for. For example, multiple essays may have a prompt that asks you share a time when you overcame a challenge. You can “recycle” the story portion your challenge for multiple essays, but to each specific scholarship in the introduction and concluding paragraphs.
Once you’ve finished, proofread the essay yourself and have an editor double and triple check your work before you send it in for consideration with the scholarship committee.
Reducing the amount of time you consume writing essays by recycling and reusing writing you’ve already done can give you an edge in the highly competitive scholarship game. Using this and as many tactics and resources you can will help increase the chances you’ll be financially as ready for college as possible.
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Reuse, Recycle to Reduce Time Spent on College Scholarship Essays originally appeared on usnews.com
