Build your personal brand

Your personal brand is the answer to the age-old question of "Who are you?", not only for scholarship searches, but also for many more decisions down the road.

Establishing your personal brand will help you write more focused, more concise scholarship essays and have better college admissions interviews, increasing the likelihood of getting additional free money.

So what is your personal brand? It's your personal "superhero" power, the thing or things you do that you're so passionate about, so good at, that no one else you know is as passionate or as focused as you are in that area. It doesn't have to be "traditional" areas of excellence; certainly, academic competitiveness is never out of place in a scholarship application, but activities and interests go far beyond student government, school newspapers, and other, more traditional interests.

Your personal brand is the topic you talk about with friends in deep conversation into the night. It's the hobby you miss meals working on, the interest that makes hours seem like minutes.

Take the time to establish your personal brand. Marketing and personal branding master Mitch Joel recommends a process for figuring out your personal brand. First, to determine what your personal brand is, write down your story so far - the narrative of your life. Look for recurring themes, recurring personality traits about yourself that you feel positive about, that you'd want to emphasize and share. This step may take a little while, but it's worth doing, and as a bonus, it may help you to remember some very memorable stories that you can later use in scholarship essays.

Write out your story in long form, and think about how you would tell it, what you would emphasize if, for example, someone were to make a movie out of your life. What are your high points, accomplishments, greatest challenges that you overcame?

Second, once you find one or two personal themes in your life, work out ways of explaining them in very concise terms. Think about how you'd express your key personality traits, hobbies, interests, or passions in a single text message. Some examples:

* "I awaken superheroes."
* "I help people understand their personal brand."
* "I make my own TV"
* "I take fun seriously."
* "I combine expertise across old and new media."
* "Tech evangelist to the arts."

Take your personal story and tagline to a close friend and ask them how they perceive you, what they think about you, and how they would tell your story to someone else. Very often, family members and close friends remember small details that can later become very important in your scholarship search.

Finally, take inventory of all your interests, activities, hobbies, associations, etc. in a spreadsheet or text document. Look through your personal story that you wrote for all the details about sports you've played, people you've met, associations you've joined, and so forth.

Make notes about all of these components of your life story and organize them; once we begin our search in earnest, each of the details in your story will become keywords with which you will use to search the Internet for scholarships.