With many years of experience in writing essays for submitting scholarships to study abroad around the world, I found that the most struggling that students met when applying for the scholarship is the scholarship essay (Often called SOP Statement of purpose, or motivation letter/essay). With my experience, I along with the successful scholarship hunters have concluded through this article. Hope you can refer and improve your writing skills to “write my essay” to hunt the best scholarship.

1. Please distinguish PS and SOP

PS (Personal Statement): Focus more on your personality, your personality. Often PS is written in the form of very personal stories in which you can express your bravery, creativity, maturity. Very few people got PS mixed up with other articles, but I still have to mention it here to easily explain why people often get a mistake when writing SOP and PS.

SOP (Statement of Purpose): Focus most on your 5-year and 10-year orientation. When asking candidates to submit SOPs, schools often want to use SOP to learn about the maturity of the candidate’s thoughts and ideas. So this essay is less about personality. SOP requires you to write more about your self-development motivation, explaining who you are, what position you are at after 10 years. Then, you must clearly state why studying this school is a step for you to get closer to your 10-year image. Many of them wrote SOP but looks like PS. Probably because they were always advised that writing essays for American schools had to tell a very moving and seamless story to get a high scholarship. SOP is still a story but that story must lead to motivation and a 10-year goal.

In summary, in PS you have the right to be a “dreamer” dreamer because it’s personality but in SOP you have to mention a feasible plan to realize that dream.

2. The essay should not start with an early childhood story

Many of you talk about a memory when you were 9, 10 years old, and how that memory affected your career choice. For example, a student wrote that when he was 10 years old, his father brought a computer, and he loved the computer ever since. Or a student recall when her mother asked her to sell goods and calculate the profit of her goods, so she loved to learn finance from there. If I were a scholarship examiner (Adcom.) And read the scholarship essay that opened like this, I would throw the article away immediately.

Why?

• First, no one believes that an individual’s hobbies or career choices start at such a tiny time. People will know right away you’re lying !!
• Secondly, the stories of childhood sounded both innocent and unprofessional. We need to remember that we are asking for (A lot of money) to study abroad, so we have to be professional!

3. Choose optimistic, positive language

Because what the examiner wants to know is how you handled the situation and how you got over it, not listening to you lamenting. From there, they know who you are. It sounds silly, but readers may forget the details you gave in the essay, but it’s hard to forget the feelings they get when they read it.

4. A rambling essay does not go straight to the point.

The reason is probably due to the way we study literature. The writing style of foreigners, especially in the West is very different from in the East. They are always encouraged to write clearly and get straight to the mini-essay point. In addition, the scholarship examiners (Adcom.) are extremely busy, sometimes they have to read dozens or hundreds of articles a day. They will be bored if they read the first page of an article without understanding what the writer is going to write. Again, each essay is limited to a certain number of words (eg, 500 words for each essay of the Chevening scholarship, the 1,000-word Irish Aid scholarship for mini essays, Erasmus Mundus scholarship does not exceed 1,000 words for LoM, …)

When I write my essay I write valuable ideas, sentences, and a good writing structure to make the scholarship hunt essay stand out.

5. Don’t show off what you wrote in your CV

Many candidates use the essay’s space to talk about what the reviewers need to spend 10 seconds going through the resume to know. Notice that people want to know your “experience”. That is what you experience, feel, interact with, and react to. Not the numbers in the report card!

Use the limited space of the essay to talk about experiences that are not mentioned before. Think of your essay as a relaxing interview, an exclusive time “face to face” between you and the examiner’s board. Let us see why we should include you in our learning community.

6. Should we write an essay too academic or specialized?

The essay is an opportunity to show your strengths in non-academic areas, especially personality. Don’t waste your chance to tell us who you really are.

Some of you specialize in doing scientific research and might be excited to talk about things like “in-vitro” or “in vivo” and then … nothing to do.

Instead, first imagine that your reader is a college graduate and has the normal knowledge of a college graduate, but NOT KNOW anything about your field. And you have to “write my essay” in the way that such a person understands what you mean.

7. Should you be too proud of your IELTS score?

Although IELTS can assess a person’s English ability in some fields, remember that writing essays for scholarships or studying abroad is very different from writing IELTS.

So, learn to write and practice writing as much as possible!

Writing a successful essay to apply for a scholarship to study abroad is an art. I always tell my friends that when I write my essay I can express myself and try to make up for other weaknesses on my profile. A strong essay can save SAT, GRE, and GMAT scores.

However, in order to have such an essay, you must really understand yourself and note that even if you are trying to personalize your essay, do not make the mistakes mentioned above.

I hope that with my sharings to write my essay, you can have your own essay to gain a satisfactory scholarship.