2006 Scholarships

Beat The GMAT! is a community service project. One of the founding principles is that all profits earned by this project are given back to the community in the form of scholarships and services. With this in mind, it gives me great pleasure to announce a new initiative to provide financial aid to our community members: Beat The GMAT! Monthly Mini Scholarships

Monthly Mini Scholarship winners will be decided every month by an essay contest. On the first day of each month, I will post an essay topic on this forum and members will have an opportunity before the last day of the month to reply with their response.

One winner will be selected each month. The prize will be a $50 Amazon.com Gift Certificate.

To be eligible for the Beat The GMAT! Monthly Mini Scholarships:

1. You must be a registered member of this forum.
2. You must have posted at least 30 messages on this forum (the more the better--I will take that into consideration). Moreover, your posts must be substantive; if your posts are not meaningful, you will not be eligible to win a mini scholarship.

I will try to post essay topics that deal with a variety of subjects: business, society, humor, etc. These essays are meant to be informal; members should be as creative as possible in their responses. There are no constraints on length—write as much or as little as you wish.

I encourage all members to take advantage of these monthly scholarships! Best of luck, and thanks for helping me build a great GMAT community!

I just wanted to add some clarification on what I mean by "substantive posts." As I had described in the rules above, members who apply for this scholarship must have posted at least 30 meaningful messages on this forum to be eligible for this scholarship.

These posts should be thoughtful. I understand that there is a lot of subjectivity in determining what is "thoughtful" or not, but I'm sure the members on this forum have a sense of what I mean. I don't want to see one-word responses to other peoples' posts, or messages that add zero value to a discussion.

Ideally, I would like members to post issues they are having with specific GMAT questions, as well as to post thorough responses to such questions. For example, if you are confused about a specific sentence correction problem in your textbook, post the question on this forum and describe what is confusing you. Or if you see a post to a specific question, write a thorough response explaining how you would solve the problem.

This forum is a resource to help you prepare for the GMAT--use it actively! I think that you will find you gain a lot from contributing/participating in the discussion on this forum.

Best of luck!

I plan on releasing the essay topic for this month's mini scholarship on July 15. Thanks!

tngearhart wrote:Do I need to have 30 posts by July 15th, today, or by August 15th. Or a more general question, does a member need to have 30 posts by the essay topic release date or by the essay deadline?

Thanks for this question. The answer is, I expect the member to have at least 30 posts by essay deadline.

Best of luck!

aim-wsc wrote:one more query sir,

just a thought:
what about disabling the smillies for essays?

i think, when one couldnt express his/her feelings through his/her pen, smillies help.

please tell us clearly about this.

These essays are fairly informal. If you would like to use smilies, you can. But keep in mind that this scholarship competition may present a good opportunity to practice your writing for your application essays--smilies will certainly not be permitted for those essays.

I'll leave the decision to you, thanks!

Folks:

I'm changing the schedule of these mini scholarships--essay topics will be released on the first day of the month, and responses will be due by the last day of the month.

Thanks! The topic for the January 2007 mini scholarship will be released around January 2, 2007 (probably will be partying the day before ).