Scholarship and College Application Essays

Scholarship and college applications often require you to write essays. Lucky for me, I love writing essays. Writing about personal experiences and lessons learned is where I thrive. However, most people aren't like me. For the next few posts, I'm going to share with y'all some of the essays that I had to write. This first one, I wanted to pick an essay that was short and sweet.
This was part of my application to the University of Oklahoma as well as for the President's Leaders' Class. It's very common for students to reuse old essays that they wrote for school or various other things for college applications. I first wrote this essay for my application for the Hugh O'Brien Youth Leadership award in the 10th grade, which I ended up winning.

Here's a 100 word essay on leadership:


For some reason, people have developed the strange idea that a leader is "in charge," but in reality, a leader is no more in charge than anyone else. A leader simply sets the path for others to follow, but others must choose to follow the path on their own. It is only when people willingly follow that path that a leader begins to be "in charge." Compassion, assertiveness, dedication, and responsibility are the types of qualities that cause other people to follow a leader. A person does not choose to be a leader; rather, others choose to make him/her one.