A scholarship can be the door you have been waiting for. A year ago, I received a fully-funded Mastercard scholarship, and I did that after receiving 17 rejections. Now, I will show you how I did that and how you can too. First, picture this: there are 15,000 people and 50 people need to be selected for a scholarship worth £80,000. Why should that scholarship body decide to invest in you? Why are you the best person to be invested in, and why should they invest in you now? Why should you be one of the 50 people selected? Don’t think they must invest in you just because you want to get it. Think about it as a journey in which you have already made a lot of progress. You need to get the door open. Here is how I opened mine, and here is what I would do differently if I was starting from rejection number one again.
1. Know Your Story Before Anyone Else Does
Many scholarships would need you to share your story. Your past, your present, and your future, especially as it relates to your career. Your understanding of your own personal journey, story, life, and trajectory would be a shaping force for you to define where you are headed. This isn’t just about writing a nice paragraph for the personal statement. It’s about actually sitting down, sometimes for weeks, and asking yourself hard questions: Where did I start? What shaped my choices? What am I really working towards, and why? For me, that meant going back to why I even chose my field in the first place, tracing it through the projects I had taken on, the setbacks, and connecting all of that to the future I wanted the scholarship to help me build. If you can’t tell your own story to yourself in a way that makes sense, you won’t be able to convince a panel of strangers either.
2. Do the Work, Not Just the Application
You don’t want to go around lying about things you did not do. You want to reflect on what you have done and how that leads you to a future, and how, with a scholarship, you would leverage that to be and do even more. Make sure you are telling an authentic story of your own work.
Make sure it is verifiable, and make sure you are doing it from a place of something you are truly invested in and not because you just want a scholarship. After applying 17 times over three years, I realised that my courage for the work I was doing had not waned because of rejections, and even now, I find the need to leverage all I am learning to do and be more. What kept me going wasn’t the scholarship itself, it was the work. I kept publishing, kept volunteering, kept building, even after rejection number 10, number 14, number 17. By the time I got that yes, I had a body of work that could speak for itself, not because I planned it that way, but because I never stopped. Get the work done!
3. Show, Don’t Tell
It’s very sweet to write a beautiful story, but make sure that as you are telling stories, you are showing what you have done and adding the numbers, the impact, the journey, and everything. An example is saying “I led a project” versus “I led a project that reached 500 students and raised £10,000.” The second one gives the panel something to picture and something to verify. Go through your own CV and personal statement and ask yourself, for every line, can I attach a number, an outcome, or a name to this? If a reader can’t picture what you did or measure its impact, that line application probably needs more work.
4. Network
Get close to people who have walked that path, understand their journey, understand how they got in, and leverage that knowledge. This can be as simple as sending a message on LinkedIn to a past scholar and asking for 15 minutes of their time. Most people who have won something like this remember what it felt like to be on the outside, and many are willing to share what worked for them, what they’d do differently, and sometimes even review your application. I did this myself, and some of the most useful feedback I got on my personal statement came from people who had sat in that exact interview room before me.
5. Research
The truth is, every scholarship knows who they are looking for. The day I got into the interview room for my scholarship, I was as convinced as anything that this scholarship was looking for me. The scholarship is also looking for the right fit; that is why they put out a call for applications. So, research, research. What is this programme about, who is it for, what kind of people have been getting in in the past, what does it cover, who would likely not get this, where do I fall? Research extensively about the programme you want to get into, the university, the place, the country, the scholarship. Look at past cohorts if the information is public. Look at the kind of work previous winners were doing before they got selected. Look at what the scholarship body says about itself, its mission, its values, and see how your own story genuinely lines up with that, not how you can force it to line up. Research is also crucial because it would help you filter which scholarships you should be applying to and where you stand a greater chance.
Next week, I will share with you more tips on how you can win, learning from my own experience. So, stay tuned. I am rooting for you. Disclaimer – All views shared here are strictly my views and from my experience, and do not reflect the views of any scholarship body.
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