"How have you contributed to your school" - HELP, Writer's block

Task - "How have you contributed to your school community. Must be at least one page."

I have a personal philosophy in life: If somebody else can do something that I'm doing, they should do it. And what I want to do is find things that would represent a unique contribution to the world - the contribution that only I, and my portfolio of talents, can make happen. Those are my priorities in life.

-Neil deGrasse Tyson

It wasn't until fourth grade when I signed up to be an altar server that I started contributing to my school community. Before then I was just did what I was need and nothing more. I was bad at sports, still bad at sports, and everything else seemed like just extra work without much of a reward, which left me with a lot of free time. But after a couple weeks of altar serving I realized it wouldn't feel as much of a chore as I thought it would and so I looked for something else that I could join. Later they started asking for people to join choir. I didn't have the greatest of singing voices, but I could sing and that's what mattered. At first it was pretty nerve-wrecking having to sing in front of the whole school but the more I sang the more I got used to it.

Later in sixth grade I joined my school's reading olympics team and from December till May read ten books in preparation for the Olympics. Recently though I've begun campaigning for eighth grade student representative.

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I'm not sure how to keep going or expand on it. This is the essay portion of the Neumann Scholarship program, but I'm just struggling to get through it. Whenever I try to keep going I get anxious and nervous and just stop. I'm actually not sure if I'm even going about this the right war. Is this too informal, or generic, or should I go about this in more list-like fashion and describe each "contribution" as if they were vocabulary words and I just had to write down my correlation with this "contribution". Also as for the quote, my idea was to somehow tie it with my opening, but then I felt like that would come off as if I was a tad vain and self-serving.

Also, they never specified a font, or font size so will Arial 12, at 1.5 spacing be alright?

Daltos, when you are writing an essay geared towards a scholarship application, it is best to familiarize yourself with the scholarship program. That means you need to understand the mission, objectives, and goals of the foundation in order to decipher what kind of information they may smile upon when considering scholarship applicants. So, they want to learn about how you have contributed to your school. Contrary to your idea though, you don't need to create a bullet list with descriptions of what you did in school. The committee is actually looking for just one notable participation that you made within the school community. So what you need to do is list down all of your participation in school activities and then pick the one that you believe best represents your school participation. Build your essay around that activity.

From what I gather, you go to a religious school and have not really done much in terms of active school community participation. So we are faced with a predicament here. The Neumann Scholarship is connected with the Connelly Foundation, that pays particular attention to academically talented yet financially strapped students from religious schools. So perhaps you need to present yourself a student who has contributed to the academic development of your school ? However, the scholarship is religion based so there is a possibility that you should build up the fact that you are an altar boy and then expand that in such a way that it reflects upon your academic and social contribution to the school. One of these two ideas should work for you.

If you go with the academic development, mention everything that you can about the academic Olympics that you joined and what the outcome for that was. If you go with being an altar boy, talk about your charitable and volunteer activities that accompanied being an altar boy. Either way, you will have concentrated one of the two factors that the scholarship committee will be highly interested in knowing about.

Whichever method you choose to go with, we are here to help you perfect its content and polish it. So don't be shy about posting your completed essay here for further review :-) Don't be afraid to ask questions either. We'll be glad to answer whenever we can ;-)