Is Your Mom Right About Earning a High School Scholarship? What Recipients Actually Want You to Know
Last Tuesday, I was folding sweatpants on the kitchen counter while my 16-year-old daughter Lila picked at a half-eaten peanut butter granola bar after college counseling. The dishwasher hummed in the background, and suddenly she slid her phone across the counter, screen bright. The top of a Reddit thread glowed: “To all those who have gotten high school scholarships, is my mom right?”
Lila’s mom, that’s me. The thing I’d said two nights before, when we were talking about scholarship applications, was that she didn’t need to stuff her activities list with five new clubs and volunteer gigs just to look impressive. Lila has spent every Saturday for the last three years at our local animal shelter, running their feral cat trap-neuter-return program. She quit student council after a semester because the meetings cut into her after-school cat check-ins, and she dropped debate team because it gave her weekly panic headaches. I told her to lean into the cats, stop scrolling TikTok for “scholarship resume hacks” that tell you to be everything all at once.
But Lila’s classmate got a full merit scholarship to a state university last spring, and that kid had 12 activities listed on their application. Her best friend is already signed up for four new clubs junior year just for apps. So Lila started second-guessing me. She posted that question on a college subreddit, then asked Jake, my sister’s 22-year-old son who got a full academic scholarship to our in-state university three years ago, if I was wrong. Jake said he’d come over for barbecue that weekend, and he’d talk through it.
Jake showed up with a bag of store-bought potato salad, grabbed a burger off the grill, and sat down at our backyard picnic table with Lila. When she asked him point-blank if I was wrong to tell her not to pad her resume, he laughed and pulled up his own old application on his phone. His activities list was three lines long: 1) Fixed and donated used bikes to neighborhood kids, four years; 2) Part-time courtesy clerk at the downtown grocery store, 20 hours a week, two years; 3) Varsity cross country, junior year. That was it. No board leadership positions, no honor society (he forgot to turn in the paperwork senior year), no ten different clubs he attended once a month. He said his scholarship essay was just about the bikes: how he started after he saw a kid walking three miles to school every day because his bike’s tire was flat and his mom couldn’t afford to fix it. He wrote about how he once spent three weeks fixing a rusted 24-inch bike for a girl who wanted to join the local YMCA’s bike club, and how that stuck with him more than any quiz or club meeting ever did. He said the scholarship coordinator told him later that half the applications they read that year had the same generic list of 10 clubs and one-off volunteer trips, and his application stuck out because it felt like him, not a checklist.
After that, Jake added Lila to a group chat he’s in of local kids who got full or half merit scholarships in the last four years. By the end of the weekend, she had 11 answers to her question. One girl who got a fine arts scholarship said she only listed two activities: her after-school job at her parents’ bakery and art club. Her essay tied the two together, talking about how measuring flour and decorating cakes taught her color and spatial skills that made her a better painter. A guy who got an athletic scholarship for wrestling said he wasn’t the top-ranked wrestler in the state, but he spent every practice staying an extra hour to help the new freshman who had never wrestled before. The coach who gave him the scholarship told him that was the reason he got picked, not his win-loss record. Almost every single person said the same thing: committees don’t care how long your activities list is. They care that you actually cared about something, enough to stick with it even when it was boring or inconvenient.
I’ve been thinking about this ever since, because so many parents I talk to are panicking about this same thing. They’re signing their kids up for all sorts of activities they don’t even want just because they think it’ll help with scholarships. What I’ve learned from this conversation is there are three small, doable things you can do instead of pushing for a mile-long resume. First, when your kid starts prepping applications, ask them to pick one thing they’ve done for at least a year that they can talk about for 10 minutes without stopping. That’s the thing to lean into, not the random community service trip they did once last summer. Second, if they’re worried their one thing isn’t “impressive” enough, have them write down three specific small stories from that thing. Lila wrote down the time she stayed three extra hours at the shelter in January to sit with a feral kitten that got sick after rescue, and the time a woman who adopted one of her TNR cats brought her a thank you cookie. Those stories are way more memorable than “I was treasurer of the environmental club.” Third, don’t let your kid add more than one new activity after junior year starts just for applications. If they already have something they show up for regularly, adding more just means they’ll spread themselves too thin, and they won’t have any good stories to tell about any of it.
Lila still has moments of doubt. After she went to a scholarship workshop at school last week, she came home and asked again if we should sign her up for the youth leadership program that starts next month. I told her it’s up to her, if she actually wants to go, but if she’s only going to make time for it by cutting back on shelter days, it’s not worth it. For now, she’s decided to stick with the cats, and she’s been working on her essay outline, pulling those little stories she wrote down onto the page. I don’t know if she’ll get a full scholarship, or any scholarship at all. But what I do know is that right now, she’s not stressing herself out over a bunch of stuff she doesn’t care about just to check a box. And that feels like a win, no matter how it turns out.
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