Tips, Application Advice and FAQ’s

This section is intended to provide you with additional information that may facilitate the application process. For more information please visit the Top Scholarship Office.

• Why apply?
• Goals and Expectations
• Writing a Personal Statement
• Asking for letters of recommendation
• Interviewing strategies

Why Apply?

This is a valid question and one that should not be overlooked in the rush to the applications. Successful applications take lots of time and effort, and if the scholarship is not a good match for you this process can also be extraordinarily difficult. So again, why apply? If "having someone else pay for graduate school" is your principal reason for applying, please know that there are easier paths to follow. Many graduate programs offer teaching assistantships, fellowships and other scholarships to their students and this is a common and accepted way to help finance graduate education. But if you are looking for something more and are willing to go out on a limb these opportunities offer life-changing experiences. Now is the time to dream.

While it certainly is not a given that if you apply, you will be selected, it is certainly true that if you don't apply you will never be selected. Many students discount their successes and experiences and convince themselves that they could never win, yet students win every year. Those students are people who have taken advantage of the opportunities available to them, and in some cases, made their own opportunities. This means that you are, in large part, being measured against yourself. Do you always talk about what you are going to do in the future or are you taking action to bring that future closer to you? If you see a lack or a need, either within yourself or the larger community, do you complain about it or do you do something about it? If you are a "doer" then you should explore these opportunities. These scholarships are not a "reward" for past good behavior, but your past record is an indication of the type of person you are and it is in this light that you will be measured.

Whether or not you are awarded a scholarship, you will gain valuable insight about yourself during the process and emerge with some useful skills. In applying for these scholarships you are asked to provide a personal statement and a plan of study. This is hard work, requiring intense self-reflection, writing and re-writing, and possibly being asked to make difficult choices. However through this process you will gain a better understanding of who you are, where you have been and where you are going. You may discover that you hold strong convictions and you will be able to articulate them and in turn this may help you direct your future. You will have letters of reference and new interviewing skills. You will have the knowledge and self-confidence that comes from having persevered through a difficult process. You will emerge from the process with a better sense of "You" and what really matters to you.

Goals and Expectations When Applying for a Top Scholarship

You've decided you are really going to do it - you are going to apply for a top scholarship -- and now you are wondering what you are getting into. Listed below are goals and expectations during this process. For further discussion of this topic, please visit the Top Scholarship Office.

Goals of the Campus

• To facilitate able students in applying for Top Scholarships. This means that the campus support team will work as hard as you do in preparing for these scholarships. We cannot and will not do your work for you. Please know that you are engaging in an activity that will certainly take considerable time and effort. We will assist you in appropriate ways, but this effort must originate and be sustained from and by you.
• To send forward to the national competitions as many qualified candidates as possible.
• To prepare students for possible interviews with Scholarship Foundations.
• To celebrate each applicant’s achievements, regardless of outcome.
• To promote a sense of excellence among the CU student body and larger community, as exemplified when a student earns a Top Scholarship.

Expectations of Student Applicants

• To take this process seriously. We expect that you will work hard to produce a quality application. In addition to your best work in your answers on the application this means typing the forms when necessary, checking for spelling, typographical, grammatical or other errors and being responsive to deadlines.
• To read the Rules and Regulations published by each Foundation and be aware of its guidelines.
• To be thoughtful, rigorous and honest in your answers to us and to the Foundations.
• To treat your referees with respect. This means asking for letters sufficiently ahead of schedule, so that your referees are not pressured by time constraints. This also means giving your referees sufficient information such that they can write you a wonderful letter and know to whom to address it, and where to send it upon its completion. Please also inform your referees that this is a long process and that you will periodically need updated letters from them.
• To meet stated deadlines.
• To be detail-oriented in the final applications.
• To be available to come to campus interviews, mock interviews and other events planned for your benefit.
• To thank the people who help you through this process. This means writing thank you notes to your referees and mock interview panelists.

Writing a Personal Statement

A personal statement often strikes fear in the hearts of the most intrepid students. How can a mere 1000 words be so difficult? And yet students struggle with these essays, for after all, how can you adequately condense your life and experiences in 1000 words?

“What are they looking for?” and “What do they want me to say?” are common questions with a deceptively simple answer. “They” are looking for the story of you – not a narrative resume and not a summation of your achievements and accomplishments but a brief insight into “you”. How does one do this? While there is no formula for writing an excellent personal statement there are some elements that must be included. The statement should accurately reflect you as a person – it should dig deep to let the reader know something about you – not so much what you have done, but what life and its experiences have meant to you. What makes you tick? What are you excited about? What experiences have changed you or motivated you and what does that motivation look like?

The personal statement is really an implicit argument – that you are a good match for the scholarship. You are asking the selection committees to choose you out of a pile of outstanding students. This doesn’t mean you should attempt to shock or humor the committee in order to get attention but it does mean that you must be genuine, honest and articulate about yourself. You may do this in a creative way or in a very straightforward way, but it should reflect you. If the reader were to meet you they would be eager to talk with you and would have some understanding of the kind of person you would be.

The selection committees are generally very straightforward in the written materials about their expectations for applicants. Knowing this, it makes sense to choose those experiences in your own life that best reflect these expectations and highlight them in your personal statement. You have limited space in which to share your story so you necessarily must be choosy about which details to mention. Mention those that best fit the stated goals of the scholarship. Again – do not be disingenuous or dishonest in your representations. If the scholarship is not a good fit for you, then find another. Don’t sacrifice your self-respect to shape yourself into what you imagine the committee is looking for.

Below are additional resources about writing a personal statement. Remember that the Top Scholarship Office is happy to read and discuss your personal statement with you. One quick reminder – these statements are hard to get just right. Don’t wait until the last minute to get started. No one writes a good statement off-the-cuff. Expect to make several revisions of several drafts.

• See the Berkeley website at http://scholarships.berkeley.edu under “Tips for Applying.” Read The Rhodes Scholarship: Notes for Truman Scholars and Other College Students, by Louis Blair, Executive Secretary of the Truman Foundation. (The advice applies to the Marshall and Mitchell personal statements as well.)
• See the Truman website at http://www.truman.gov under “Guidance to Candidates” for additional information about personal statements.
• See the handout below prepared by Dr. Marjorie McIntosh, Distinguished Professor of History at CU, for Rhodes, Marshall, Mitchell and Gates Scholarships which can easily be adapted to other essays.

Issues/Topics/Questions to be Addressed in a Rhodes/Marshall/Gates/Mitchell Essay
(which can be adapted to other scholarships)
written by Professor Marjorie McIntosh, University of Colorado.

Throughout your essay, remember that you are describing you interests and plans to readers who may not know anything about your field. Hence your statements need to be in clear, direct language, without specialized terms or jargon. But at the same time, it is possible that a member of the selection committee may know a great deal about your subject; you should therefore be prepared to discuss in depth during an interview any topic you bring up in the essay.

1. What is your strongest interest/concern, the approach or problem you care most deeply about, and how has that led to your longer-term career goals?
   • Here you need to make clear not only what matters to you, but why it does. This is the place to introduce what can be described as your passion.
   • You may wish to describe one or more specific instances from your own experience or reading that illustrate why you feel so strongly about this issue.
   • Say briefly what you plan to do with your life that addresses this interest/concern and how you hope to make a contribution in that area. (You can develop this more fully in #7 below.)

2. Describe how you have identified your primary issue, what factors contributed to your interest in it and how you came to view and define it as you have. Again, be specific; give examples to make your statements come to life. (This whole question could well be merged with #1 above in your essay.)

3. What intellectual/academic background have you built up that will help you to address your area of concern in the future? Here you might think both about a good knowledge base, including different approaches to your area of interest, and also your skills, your intellectual tool kit that will help you to deal effectively with it.
   • Describe the foundation you have acquired through coursework and readings. If you have more than one major, discuss them all, showing how each has contributed to your ability to move forward with your interest.
   • If you have had any unusual academic experiences that added to your background in this area (e.g., study abroad, attending special summer programs or conferences, taking a graduate course,) describe them. Make clear how these tie in directly with your self-defined interest. If they aren’t related, don’t mention them.
   • If you have done an honors thesis or other independent research project, describe it, drawing specific connections between what you have learned from it and you longer-term interests/plans. Your thesis must be linked directly to what you want to do in the future to be effective – that it helped to sharpen your interest in X, or introduced you to approach Y, or made you realize that you must acquire additional background in Z, or whatever.
   • If you have done additional reading in your area of interest, outside the formal academic setting, you may want to describe some of the ideas or approaches you have encountered that you find exciting.
   • This whole section will help to provide the intellectual background for what you will describe below in #5 and #6 about what you want to do in Britain.

4. What other experiences have you had that have helped to shape your interests and given you tools that will help you to address them effectively in the future?
   • The key here is not to list a bunch of activities but rather to select a few (preferably interesting, even unusual ones,) that you can show have contributed directly to your interests and the skills/experience you bring to your area of concern. If you can’t make that connection, don’t bother to mention them. Instead focus on a few that are relevant and describe them more fully, sating explicitly what you think you have gained from each that will be a useful tool in going after whatever it is that you have defined as your main interest/concern.
   • Here too, examples are imperative. If you did volunteer work in Chile, don’t say simply that the experience was important to you, but say why, describing a few incidents that illustrate what the experience meant, how it has contributed to where you want to head longer-term and how it has helped to prepare you to make a contribution.

5. Why do you want to study in Britain, and at the particular programs that you list? (For a Marshall essay, these will go into the second essay on your program of study.)
   • In this part of the essay, you must demonstrate that studying in Britain offers something not available in this country. If the selection committee ends up thinking that you would be better off studying in the US, you will not get a scholarship. Thus, you could say that the interdisciplinary approach of Program X would provide you with a broader but still integrated intellectual base than moving into a graduate program in a single discipline, as is required in this country. Or you could refer to the cutting-edge research done in Britain in your field, with particular details of what is being done there that is not available in this country.
   • You should not say or imply that studying in Britain is good because it is prestigious. Don’t fall back on bland statements like “Oxford’s tutorial system would challenge me.”
   • Instead be detailed and precise about the program in which you hope to participate (2 for the Marshall.) Say, for example, that you like the integration of coursework in anthropology and economics during the first year, which would help you for these reasons, while during the second, which features a long research paper, you would work on topic X. Make clear why topic X could be effectively, ideally exclusively, pursued in Britain, and how it would contribute to your eventual goals.

6. Who are the individual scholars with whom you are particularly eager to study in that/those program(s)?
   • It is not enough here just to mention a few names. Instead you need to have looked them up, learned something about their background, interests and publications and read some of their articles/books. Refer in your essay to one or more ideas or approaches of theirs that you admire and want to learn more about, mentioning the works of theirs you have read. If you have been to a meeting where you heard them or other people with similar approaches speak, mention that too.
   • Remember here, as elsewhere, you must say why their approach is interesting and why you want to work with them, rather than just saying that you want to do so.

7. End by saying a little about what you hope to do longer-term with your career. How do you plan “to make the world a better place,” as one of these scholarships requires? How do you think that the preparation you would get by studying in Britain would help you to do so?

   • You don’t have to talk about exactly what kind of job you want, but you could say you hope to work for a non-profit organization that works with women, for example.
   • Tie your essay back to the opening paragraph by talking about the way in which you hope to put your “passion” into practice.

Letters of Reference and Recommendation

This section is to provide you with information on how to seek a letter of recommendation in such a way that you are likely to get a good one.

Letters of reference are an important, even critical part, of scholarship, internship and graduate school applications. While you cannot control what the referee will write (or even be able to view it), you can provide the referee with specific information that will greatly facilitate their ability to write an exemplary letter. Faculty members and others will be gratified that you have chosen them to write a letter for you but will be less than pleased if they are not provided with sufficient information. Do yourself a favor and be prepared when you ask for a letter. Some guidelines are suggested below:

• Visit the professor during office hours or make an appointment to see the professor in person. Do not ask for a letter via phone or email. It will be difficult for the professor to understand the importance of the task if it is treated casually by you.
• During this visit bring the following items:
  1. An updated copy of your curriculum vitae or resume and a list of your activities.
  2. Information about the scholarship for which you applying, including the award and its selection criteria.
  3. Your transcript.
  4. A brief outline describing in what context you know the referee. Don’t forget to include how long you have known the referee and from where, list the classes you have taken if appropriate, including any special work and your grade and whether they have any other knowledge about you that could be useful to the selection committee. This could include past conversations about your plans and goals, research interests and work, thesis work, independent work, etc. If your referee knows more about you, such as your community or leadership work, you could ask them to include this information in the letter as well.
  5. The name, title and address of the person and/or committee to whom the letter should be addressed. This should include the complete address, including street, city, state and zip code. Make sure the spellings are accurate.
  6. The due date of the letter and where it should be sent upon completion (back to you, to the Top Scholarship Office, to the selection committee or somewhere else.)
  7. The number of copies required, if more than one.
  8. Your personal contact information, in case the referee has additional questions.
  9. A stamped (if necessary), addressed envelope for the letter.
• Ask for the letter in a timely fashion. Don’t expect the referee to drop whatever they are doing in order to write you a letter that is due tomorrow. Give them plenty of notice. Also, remember to ask whether the referee would feel comfortable in writing a strong recommendation. If they are not able to do so, then thank them for their time and prepare to ask someone else.
• Finally, once you have the letter, don’t forget your manners! Write your referee a thank you note and let them know how you fared in the competition. They have invested some time and effort into helping you and will want to celebrate your success.

Interviewing Strategies

Top 10 List of Interviewing Strategies

1. Be Yourself – Don’t try to impress the panel by trying to be what you think they want.

2. Know Yourself – Think about who you are, what you believe and what you want to do in the future.

3. Know Your Application – This is the only information the panel knows about you, so review what you wrote in order to build on those important themes during the discussion.

4. Know Your Audience – Know when the interview will be held, know who will be interviewing you, know for what you are being interviewed, and know something about the opportunity and the values of the selectors. Read the information provided on the website and the application materials.

5. Show, Don’t Tell – Stories, anecdotes, examples, analogies, etc., are much more effective than making grand, amorphous, broad or generalized statements.

6. Know About Something Larger than Yourself – You will not be expected to know everything, but there are basic and general materials from which to prepare. Do any or all of the following: read the newspaper, listen to NPR, watch PBS, read periodicals such as Newsweek, Time, National Geographic, and/or other scholarly publications.

7. Answer the Obvious Questions Ahead of Time – have others read your application and tell you what questions come to their minds. Prepare in your own mind short answers to these questions. Hint – short answers are usually better than long rambling answers.

8. Commonly Asked Questions – Prepare answers in your own mind to these frequently asked questions: What are your goals and aspirations? What is your favorite book and why? Who is the person that has meant the most to you during your life and why? Which three people throughout history would you invite to dinner and why? What ticks you off and what are you going to do about it?

9. Remember Why You Are There – You will often find the panel interesting and lively, and therefore may become so engaged in the discussion that you forget to emphasize why they should select you. You should be trying to answer the implicit question underlying the interview – which is why should the panel select you? How do you match their goals and what they are looking for?

10. HAVE FUN! -- Smile, be polite and thank the panel for their time. Your hard work is now finished. Enjoy the opportunity and your success to this point.