Captrust Scholarship Essay

The following is a scholarship essay I submitted to CapTrust. It's more of a memoir than an academic paper. Hopefully this is a good example scholarship essay for you. It helped me solidify my personal identity and I wanted to share.

I will start with one word: Communicator. I sincerely believe that communication is the antibiotic of human society. You could solve virtually every Shakespeare play's plot by improving a few, maybe even only one character's communication capabilities.

I believe we are all better off when the weakest among us are taken care of. I believe that at a fundamental level, most humans would agree with me. I believe that most humans act in good faith to this end, most of the time. It follows that most of the time, most of our problems can be solved or at least mitigated by communication.

As a man, I have a special appreciation for the value of communication as a privileged demographic. Men in America, especially in culturally conservative places like where I am from, are often socialized to express only a very narrow range of their emotions. This cripples our ability to communicate in ways that can hurt ourselves and others. Overcoming this training is a lifelong process, and I am grateful for all the progress I have already made toward becoming the best communicator I can.

My belief in the power and importance of communication expresses itself in many ways in my life, but the easiest to illustrate is my writing. I am an independently published fantasy author of a three-book series. The act of storytelling is itself a great work of communication of ideas, images, characters, and events.

What's more, being an indie author as opposed to a traditional one is that you must build your own team of experts. It takes many skilled people to create a book worthy of the modern book market. As the author, my role was one part storytelling and one part communication.

Another facet of this communication power is my participation in the National Association of Speech and Debate. During my time on the debate team in high school, I achieved the highest distinction for the number of tournaments I attended and my performance and team leadership at those tournaments.

I would like to emphasize that in both of these pursuits, all parties involved needed to communicate well. I see this as validation of my belief that most people are acting in good faith most of the time.

The ultimate communicator is one who teaches others to communicate. As such, I want to be a language teacher. If I could be wherever I wanted given enough time, at the height of my career, I would be an English as a Second Language teacher, spending half my year in a foreign country and the other half in my home country of the United States.

I already hold a TEFL certificate (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). This international profession places a high value on education, however, so I additionally want to pursue a bachelor's degree in a subject other than language instruction so I have a more well-rounded view of the world. I have changed my major many times, but by this point, I have confidently settled on Political Science, with a concentration on International Relations.

I feel that this degree will make me well-equipped to not only communicate across the world, but to teach my students to do so as well. By learning how large groups of humans (countries) communicate, I can learn much about how to teach individuals and classrooms to communicate.

Growing up, I was closely involved with my immediate community. I am an Eagle Scout, as a result of years of hard work and more importantly communication. Communication with people who were experts at the skills I was trying to learn, communication with people who arranged the opportunities for me to learn those skills, and communication with my peers learning side by side with me.

There's a reason "community" and "communication" are such close words in English - without communication, there can be no community. My experience earning my Eagle was excellent preparation for my time as a proselytizing missionary across the country. This is where I acquired my passion for teaching.

Today, I am the secretary for a political caucus in my local community. We are a small group made of neighbors, trying to protect working families and preserve our unity in a country where communication is so poor. As secretary, it is my job to manage our messages to the public, and I facilitate meetings.

I have also started teaching ESL lessons as a free private tutor, to gain more experience and to benefit my community which includes so many migrants seeking a better life.