Back when I was a student, submitting lists of my extracurricular activities for various scholarship applications was more than a little daunting. I imagined the competition had mastered calculus at age 5, won Olympic gold medals by age nine, and discovered cures for cancer before hitting puberty. How could I ever compete?
The best way I found to slay this dragon of self-doubt was to regularly conduct my own personal experience inventory—a systematic search for all of the events, projects, achievements, and credentials that could help enhance my activity résumé.
For current high school and college students, conducting this inventory means taking the time to thoughtfully reflect on all aspects of school, community, social, and family life. It also means transforming these reflections into formal written lists, updating these lists on an ongoing basis and then finding simple ways to expand upon participation in key areas.
To do this most efficiently and effectively, you can help your kids follow these four steps.
Step 1: Brainstorm a Wide Range of Experiences
Start out by helping your kids compile a written list of all of the extracurricular activities, school clubs, part-time jobs, summer camps, internships and hobbies in which they have participated. Then show them how to record any noteworthy projects that they have undertaken for school classes, on behalf of friends or family, or in association with your church or synagogue.
Be sure to have them include in this list the things they do outside of school-related activities—from piano playing and stamp collecting to break dancing and bungee jumping. Just because an activity isn't formalized within the school, doesn't necessarily make it any less important.
Step 2: Record Specific Accomplishments
Under the title of each activity listed above, record the top three objectives they accomplished or specific tasks they performed as part of that activity. This will eventually form the core of their activity description.
If they are describing their participation in student government, for instance, they might choose to include their work on a school-wide food drive, the Homecoming assembly, and the budget committee.
Remind them that the best accomplishments and tasks to list are those that are concrete and specific.
Step 3: Highlight Character Qualities
To provide scholarship judges with a sense of who they are as a person, not just a laundry list of what they've done, note the top three positive character qualities that they've demonstrated through each activity.
Place special emphasis on personal qualities like determination, teamwork, leadership, creativity, responsibility, enthusiasm and individual initiative—the types of unique character qualities that are universally valued.
Next, use these character qualities to flesh out additional details about the specific accomplishments and tasks listed in step two. If, for example, they're trying to communicate the individual initiative that they exhibited on a school-wide food drive, they might mention in their activity description how they personally contacted dozens of organizations to secure group donations.
Step 4: Rank the Credentials
Because scholarship judges review piles of submissions, there is no guarantee that they will read to the end of each applicant's activity list. As a result, help your kids maximize the top of their lists—the part of their lists that scholarship judges will definitely read.
So help them rank their activities in order of importance, with the top reserved for activities that readers should definitely notice. They can subsequently re-rank their lists to best appeal to the judging criteria of each new scholarship application.
Your kids might even discover through this process that their credentials are significantly more impressive than they initially thought. They may not have won gold medals or cured diseases—that would be so cliché—but I'll bet that they can still showcase their own experiences and accomplishments in novel ways that stand out from the crowd.
Known as "America's Scholarship Coach," Ben Kaplan is publisher of the www.CityofCollegeDreams.org website and the winner of two dozen college scholarships worth $90,000. For more details on this topic, visit his College Scholarships information page.
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