How Our Students Earn Prestigious Scholarships

I wanted to share some really great news with you. This week, we found out that two of our students were awarded extremely prestigious full ride scholarships. One of them got the Brian Cameron Scholarship, which is a full ride that can be applied to any college, and it has a 0.5% admission rate. In 2024, out of the 3,000 students who applied, only 15 received the scholarship, and among them was our student that we worked with. And that student has already a great option, which is Stanford, and then the other ones, we'll see what opens up in the next few weeks. Our other student got the Morehead Cain Scholarship, which is a full ride to the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. That one has a 3% admission rate. And the student of ours has already gotten a number of other scholarships, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and admission to UT Austin, among others. So again, we're waiting to see what other options open up for the students in the spring. But we are incredibly proud of both of these students. And we know that the scholarships are going to open up amazing opportunities for them. So today, I wanted to talk about some strategies that you can use to obtain scholarships, but also to obtain a competitive edge with college admissions. They are, in fact, the same strategies. So that's good to know, right, that you can apply one set of strategies to both. So these strategies that I'm going to share with you are truly game changers. And the main advice overall is to choose activities and classes and summer planning that really have meaning for you, that are authentically connected to your values, to your goals, to your aspirations, and to what really matters to you. Because the students, the two students I talked about, that is what they did. Their choices of co-curriculars, their choices of classes, what they did in addition to their classes during the school year, and then what they did in the summer. All of this was connected to what really mattered to them. Don't think so much in terms of checking off boxes. Don't try to get in the head of admissions. Try to develop who you are, your sense of purpose, what really matters to you, and take the decisions that you're going to need to take over the course of high school to align more and more your choices, both inside and outside the classroom, with who you are and what you deeply care about. So let's start with strategy number one. So strategy number one is building a compelling profile based on what I just said, your talents, your goals, and what matters to you or your sense of meaning or purpose, right? The idea is not to pressure yourself to discover your life purpose as a teenager. That's not the point. The point is to start asking yourself these very important questions. What matters to me? What is important to me to contribute to the world? What do I feel I would like to contribute to the world? Now, again, you're starting in this process. That's a lifetime journey. But if you start asking those questions, you'll see that your choices will become much more clear. So let me give you two examples. The first student I wanted to tell you about is now at UCLA, was also admitted to UT Austin McCombs business program to extremely selective schools. And this student was primarily a dancer and developed a skill in that area and creativity in that area. However, the student also wanted to go into the business field. So she got training through entrepreneur mentors. She took courses. Sometimes these kind of creating your business motivational courses were really aimed for adults, but she actually went with her mother, who was at the time building a business as well. And she was able to learn about how to create a business and how to think in a more open-minded way that is not limited by the idea of, oh, my age, I'm a teenager, or, oh, I don't have any money to put into a business, limiting ideas that sometimes creep in without our being aware and hold us back from accomplishing the things that are really important to us. So she was able to create a dance business and started teaching dance. in her basically in her choice of her activities both through this entrepreneurial set of courses and trainings and also in creating her own business and then teaching dance through the business but but also as a volunteer. So she gave her time to groups that normally wouldn't have access to dance. So she shared her talents with the community. She also made it work for her as a future business person. And she combined all of that into her profile so that by the end of high school, when she was applying at the end of her junior year, when she was applying to colleges, she had that profile to draw from. And it was all aligned with her talents, her goals, and her sense of what really mattered for that sense of purpose. Now I'd like to talk about another student who used the same strategy and who ended up at Cornell studying computer science. And this student basically understood, figured out early on through our help, what was most important to him. Was it going to be, how was he going to use his volunteering time? How was he going to use his summers? So he chose very targeted activities that aligned with his goals, his talents, and what mattered to him. He ended up doing some competitions. He did a few internships in computer science. He also did some research in computer science and had a paper at the end. And in his local community at school and then the wider community in the city, he gave of his time and his talents to benefit others. So his volunteering was aligned with what really mattered to him and also with what he was good at. At the end, he had a profile that really held together and that demonstrated that his actions were aligned with his values and his aspirations. So that was strategy number one. Now let's go to strategy number two, which is once you have that profile, you need to tell your story, especially in the essays, but it's not just the essays. It's also in your interviews. It's in your LinkedIn profile. It's wherever you can have a platform to tell your story. You want to tell that story in an authentic and compelling way. And the important thing is bring into that story as much of you as you can. What does that mean? Elements of your background can be very, very helpful for some students because that's very much a part of their story, their cultural heritage, or the fact that they don't have time, for example, for co-curricular activities because they are giving their time to help their family. They're caring for a relative, a sibling. So all of that can be woven in. And you want to demonstrate in the story that you tell, background, the values, and your growth, how you have changed, how the challenges that you faced in your high school career have definitely shaped you, right? A lot of colleges ask that question in a bunch of different forms. So how do you do that? Well, I'm going to give you two examples. So the first student who is at NYU was looking for an interdisciplinary major. And in her story, in her essays, she talked about her background, her cultural background that got her into a lot of museums, visiting museums, traveling with her parents. This is a multicultural student who has half of her family from out of the country. And so in this interdisciplinary major, she wanted somehow to bring together some sociology, some history, possibly something to do with museum studies, because she noticed in her travels that what was in the museum was taken from another culture. And she felt very strongly that these museum pieces should be returned to their culture or their country of origin. So in her essay, she talked about her background, how that led her to this interest, but she also talked about an experience she had creating a film to help raise awareness of women's rights in her local community. And so she kind of brought together her heritage, her activism, her values, and her goals in a very beautiful and layered way that was really her. It was very authentic. It was who she was. So that's one example. The other student is now at Carnegie Mellon, and he wanted to go into a certain aspect of business that was more international. So how was he going to tell that compelling story in an authentic way, in a way that would stand out? So what he did is he brought again together parts of his heritage. He had part of his family that had an indigenous culture. He talked about how that contributed to his understanding of many different cultures. He also explained how his travels helped him become a better communicator. And in these experiences, he showed how he shared his talents with the world, how he benefited others through his different abilities, how these different experiences shaped him. So that was strategy number two. So let's move on to strategy number three. This one is all about planning and organization. Whether you are looking for funding for college or you're trying to get a competitive edge with admissions, your ability to see results is going to be directly tied to your planning and organization of the application process. So there are many different kinds of scholarships. The two that I mentioned at the beginning, Brian Cameron and Moorhead Cain, these are only two. There are hundreds of these and they are findable, definitely findable online. What you need to do, whether again, you're applying for the scholarships or you're just managing 10 to 20 different college applications, you want to have a spreadsheet that has all your tasks laid out from A to Z. This is something that we do with our students. It's very useful, so you can check them off. You want to find out what the deadlines are, both for applications and for scholarship submissions, especially because a lot of these scholarship deadlines are in the fall of your senior year when you are applying also to colleges. So it's even more important. A very useful tip is to work on your applications beginning at the beginning of the summer between junior and senior year. Try to get 99% of all the essay writing done by August 1st. And then you will have to plan out the logistics and the timing of asking for those transcripts, making sure your school is sending the letters of recommendation, sending your test scores. So all of the different moving parts, and there are quite a few, should go on to your spreadsheet. If you are submitting a portfolio, anything that shows your creativity or your accomplishments in some kind of portfolio format, factor that in. Get a timeline, decide when you're going to submit these applications, and then have several months before those deadlines to get everything together. For example, for 10 colleges, you may have anywhere from 10 to possibly 50 essays if you count small scholarship essays, larger scholarship essays, honors colleges, as well as supplemental essays, and of course, the personal statement or common app essay. So I hope that these strategies have been helpful. And you too can be in the position of the students that we've worked with who either have gotten full rides or extremely high scholarship amounts. I wish you amazing results and also joy in your learning and in your life.