By Unigo
We’re excited to announce the winner of the
Education Matters Scholarship. The question was, “What would you say to someone who thinks education doesn’t matter, or that college is a waste of time and money?”
Check out the winning essay, followed by scholarship tips from our winner.
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Rifles. Machine guns. C4. Bombs. Education.
Wait, what?
Nelson Mandela said it first: “Education is the most powerful weapon.”
Seize the guns, defuse the bombs; what are we left with? A boiling hatred and for what reason, other than ignorance and intolerance? Say our weapons were defunded, dismantled into chunks of invaluable metal. We look into the eye of our enemy and say, “I loath[e] your religion.” We announce, “I abhor your culture.” We claim, “Your environment is wrong.” We solve these problems by killing off the unattractive, going to war with those who we misunderstand. The idea behind using education as a weapon is to use it with a better aim than any sniper, to pinpoint what the actual issue is behind all the bloodshed. It’s being uneducated. It is being scared to be diverse. It is being uncultured. It is not knowing how to react to a different standard.
Being educated isn’t about learning how to get the derivative of a matrix or about how many articles you can analyze using rhetorical strategies or about knowing the vector for a traveling marble.
Being educated is about having tolerance for ideas or concepts you do not understand, considering you didn’t know it all before you started and you still don’t now.
Being educated is about understanding what you have yet to uncover, is about being okay with what remains unknown.
Hatred is a reason to pull the trigger, education is the reason to put the gun down.
—Taylor C.
Scholarship tips from our winner
How to create a winning scholarship essay
“As for writing a winning entry, my creative process for this prompt was actually incredibly simple. I’ve always valued education and what all it can do and what doors it may open, but I have also looked at it with the respect that not everything we are taught in school is simply to teach whatever subject it is. School teaches us how to learn and how to intake information. What we choose to do with that information is up to us and that’s why I think utilizing your knowledge to better the world is and will continue to be why education matters. I strongly recommend finding a scholarship you feel strongly about because that’s the only way to convey who you are, what you’re passionate about, and why you chose it all in the limited amount of space you have.”
How to find scholarships
“I found this Education Matters scholarship by using the
Unigo personalization tools. I navigated through many different types of scholarships until I found ones that were more towards free-minded writing rather than the sports or academic ones.”
Take Taylor’s advice and be a scholarship winner yourself. Use our
Scholarship Match to get personalized matching from millions of scholarships. If scholarship money just isn’t enough, try our
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