Developing a Scholarship Essay (3pts)

 

Through AUC NSBE, I had the opportunity to apply to scholarships that are specialized for AUC NSBE/DDEP students from partner companies. One of our partner companies, Qualcomm, offers a scholarship that requires an essay detailing my interest in the scholarship and how it will impact my career goals.

I started this essay by researching specific values of Qualcomm, which are integrity, technical excellence, constant innovation, and more, and started relating them back to my own experiences and values. While I expressed interest in their values, I also described my personal values of leadership, community service, and academic excellence as a student. In many scholarship essays, I begin with Spelman’s tagline, “A choice to change the world”, and write about how I plan on changing the world. This often engages the reader because it’s unique compared to other schools and displays my goals in the first sentence. 

This scholarship, like many others, prompted me to explain how it will impact my career goals. To answer this question, I always lead with my goal of fulfilling service like mentorship and education through my career, and closing the diversity gap between Black women and everyone else in engineering. Then describing how the scholarship will encourage me to make a long lasting impact on communities.

Stephanie Ferguson