Linked below are 26 Future of Eastern Maine Aspirations Scholarship applications in two groups, both grade 5. I was impressed with these applications.

I encourage you to read the application requirements and the prompts. They are different for each grade. You should also look at the Expectations Checklist and you may want to look at the 12 Tips I gave to them.

We define college very broadly, so most any program after high school works for this scholarship. They do need submit a complete application and we do ask them to have their application be error-free. We can be a little flexible on this if you choose. 4th, 5th, and 6th grade do need to identify a college of interest. Everyone needs to rate their effort in school and on the application, and the teacher needs to do the same.

We do ask for comments from a parent or other adult mentor. This gets complicated. There are some strong applications with no parent/mentor comment. That may be because the student didn’t get the job done, or it may be because the student doesn’t have support at home. It can be hard to remove them from our list of recipients because of unsupportive parents, on the other hand, they did have the option to get some other adult mentor to write something. That could be an adult at school.

Also below is a link to a scoresheet you can use if you wish. It is hard to score the first few when you have nothing to compare them to. I suggest you read several before scoring any. Generally, we score them as follows: 1 = Weak and not worthy of a scholarship; 2 = Solid and maybe worthy, but not sure; 3 = Very strong and definitely worthy of a scholarship. Selecting recipients is almost always hard.

This is not a writing contest. This is an opportunity for us to recognize effort and provide encouragement to students who put in the effort and could probably use a little extra encouragement and recognition, or to students who just did a great job.

Bob Stuart
bstuart@mainecollegecircle.org
207-318-5400

They may take a while to load since they are large files.

Link to first group of applications.

Link to second group of applications.

12 Tips

You can use this scoresheet or not.
Score sheet