eagle scout application essay example

Eagle Scout College Essay Samples And Tips For Admission

One of the most dreaded parts of applying to colleges and universities are the supplemental essays. As an Eagle or Life Scout, you might be wondering how best to write about your Scouting experience — or maybe whether you should even include it at all (You should 🙂 ).

Worry no longer! In this article, we’ll be covering some of the best ways to make your Scouting experience shine on application essays and even the Common App. Plus, I’ve also pulled together some fantastic example essay passages so you can get a feel for the writing style of great college applications.

How Should You Write An Eagle Scout College Application Essay? When writing about your Scouting experience on a college application essay, your main goal should be to tell a story about personal growth. The essay should be free of acronyms and easily understandable. The best topics to write about, for most scouts, are their unique outdoor experiences, troop leadership roles, and Eagle Scout service project.

However, there’s a lot more that goes into a successful application! Carefully read the section below to learn the best methods of structuring your application essay. Then, we’ll be jumping into some real-life examples of the best ways you could write about your Scouting experience to really make your application stand out to an admissions committee!

How to Structure a College Admissions Essay

Do you know the ways your Scouting experience can help you stand out on a college application ? If you don’t, I’d highly suggest checking out the linked article! College admissions essays may be the trickiest documents you’ll ever write, as these personal statements require both conciseness and detail. Therefore, use everything you can to get a leg up! Your writing structure will be key to clearly communicating your message.

To create an effective structure, you first need to decide on your essay’s message. What is your main point for the beginning, middle, and end of your essay? Often, effective application essays begin with a story of a personal obstacle, guide your reader to the problem’s unexpected solution, and then end with a description of the lessons you’ve taken away from overcoming the challenge you’ve faced.

The Challenge->Solution->Takeaways structure is also effective when writing informative anecdotes in your essays. Here’s a quick excerpt showing of how I used this structure in one of my actual college application essays:

Challenge: In my freshman year of high school, a classmate and I were tasked with creating a joint presentation detailing the effects of GMOs on the environment. I had prepared my materials beforehand, so, naturally, I was excited to speak. My partner, however, had completely forgotten about the project and hastily began to plan a way out. Solution: After I’d delivered my portion of the presentation, complete with graphics and pie charts, I anxiously stepped aside and began mentally preparing for my partner to get us both laughed out of the room. To my dismay, my partner resourcefully rolled a short but informative Youtube video relating to the subject, and then, in a stroke of genius, improvised a quick activity. In seconds, the entire classroom was gleefully chanting the NATO phonetic alphabet parodied to GMO-related terminology! Takeaways: I was struck, and my B to his A was all it took to convince me that effort is not directly proportional to success. From that moment, I realized that I needed to think less about the work and product itself, and more about the audience that I was delivering my creation to.

I’m sure you have stories like this in your own life as well! In Scouting, maybe you thought you’d be a great leader right away, but later realized you needed to improve your approach. Maybe your path to Eagle had a few twists and turns. Either way, by using this structure, you can better place the reader in your shoes and guide them through an interesting and exciting journey.

Remember, the goal of your admissions essay should be to show as much of your personality to the reader as possible. Tell a story. Let them see you as a unique, endearing individual, and try to get them to like you. By describing a challenge, you show vulnerability and mark yourself as the kind of person who’s able to reflect, learn, and overcome difficulties.

Sample Outline For An Eagle Scouts Admission Essay

Now that you know how to effectively structure your story, it’s time to begin looking at a few essay samples that you can draw on for inspiration. As an Eagle Scout myself, there are 3 main Scouting topics and values I’d recommend writing about in your own application essays.

Each of these three topics demonstrates values that are in high demand by universities. However, even if you don’t choose to write about these topics specifically, it’s still important to come up with a value-packed idea to serve as the core of your essay. I’d recommend watching the following video (8:51) for some great tips on coming up with your own essay idea.

Have a general idea for what you’ll be writing about? Great! Below, I’ll first be covering the best ways to capture your reader’s attention and frame your experiences. Then, with sample essays, I’ll be breaking down some of the best techniques for crafting a structurally-perfect application!

Capturing Your Reader’s Attention With Scouting

Your ‘hook,’ which serves to capture your reader’s attention, should be a concise but intriguing statement that reflects your personality. Hooks can take many different forms and engage the reader through the use of quotes, excamatory statements, or even questions.

Personally, this was the hook I used in one of my own college essays:

“Guten morgan, wie gehts. Ich heiß Cole. Ich bin seibzehn jahre alt.” I hear myself echo as I stand before my German class. Nervous, I mouth a half-smile and try to remain calm. Apprehensively making eye contact with the faces before me, even at a glance I can tell that this room is inhabited by people from all corners of the world. Judging from her defined jawline and shining blond hair, the girl who’s absentmindedly looking away appears to be Russian. The bespectacled boy with the tousled dark hair who wears a badly-translated t-shirt seemed to be distracted as well, reading from what I can only guess to be a Chinese dictionary. Another girl sits beside me, dressed in alternative clothing and sporting a septum piercing; judging from her edgy look, one would never have guessed she was from the suburbs of Rhode Island. Hearing the melody of birds chirping, I glance outside the window. On that beautiful Autumn afternoon in Switzerland, I see snow glistening on the Rhône glacier. It’s an enormous mass of brilliant blue hues, swirled together, filling the space between two gargantuan mountains: the Schwartz Horn and the Eiger. At that moment, a thought crosses my mind: “How on earth did I, just some kid from Hawaii, wind up in a place like this?”

While my introduction isn’t perfectly written, I think it does a solid job of capturing attention and pulling the reader down the page. Your essay should do the same! Keep in mind, my essay was about personal diversity and transitions, so this introduction really catered to my core theme. Your intro should also be informed by your essay’s main idea.

Now for some example hooks! If the focus of your essay is your Scouting experience, some possible hooks might be:

Basically, the point of your hook is to first grab attention and then segway into a significant experience that will continue to intrigue your reader. Tell a story around your experience, then identify a key value that you’ve learned or embodied which will serve as the core of the essay.

In the next section, I’ll teach you to craft a thesis statement based on your core theme!

Eagle Scout Values as a Core Theme

Now that you know the point of your introduction, it’s time to get into the meat of your essay: your core theme. Your core theme should be based around the values that make you, you. Remember, a reader should be able to identify your core focus at least halfway through your essay. The most effective way to do this is with a thesis statement!

It might seem like you don’t need a thesis statement for an admissions essay but having one or two sentences to encapsulate your core theme will ensure that your essay is coherent from start to finish.

Using our examples from earlier, here’s what an effectively phased thesis might sound like:

Remember, your thesis should perfectly suit your essay. Now that you know each of the ingredients for an amazing personal statement, it’s time to review some examples! Most of the experts agree that the best way to write well is to read good writing. Afterward, you’ll be ready to craft your own application and get that “Yes.” 🙂

Eagle Scout College Essay Samples and Examples

Below is a great excerpt from a personal statement that talks about a scout’s journey to Eagle. The writer does a fantastic job explaining the wide-ranging value of merit badges.

The Importance of Merit Badges

It was a long journey from an energetic adolescent to the mature man I am today. With every merit badge earned, I learned a valuable lesson about how to conduct my life. For example, the Personal Management merit badge taught me how to manage a budget. The Family Life badge gave me the skills to pitch in and help my parents run a household. Two trips to West Point Military Academy for Scout jamborees exposed me to cadets who were studying to be US Military officers and made me think about a military career. Source: https://www.collegeessayconfidante.com/sample-essays/

Leadership in Scouting

Leadership means holding yourself to a higher standard and putting your fellow scouts above yourself. In my last six years as a Scout, I have led others in finding their strengths, weaknesses, and encouraged boys to work as a team to accomplish a common goal. I started as an Assistant Patrol Leader and worked my way up to the highest leadership position, Senior Patrol Leader. Source: https://inlikeme.com/leadership-essay-scouts-effort/

Reflecting on How to be a Great Leader

While in Scouting, I took on multiple leadership roles and gradually became more involved in my troop. With those roles comes a great responsibility. Once you become involved and have responsibility, it is up to you how you want people to recognize you. You can be the leader who just points fingers and gives orders, or you can be the leader who teaches others how to do their job, is involved, is supportive and gives rewards when it is appropriate to do so. It may be difficult to do, but a true leader puts others before himself. Source: https://blog.scoutingmagazine.org/2014/01/14/what-scouting-did-for-me-a-recent-eagle-scout-tells-his-story/ Written by Ryan Eberlie

Your Eagle Scout Service Project

These experiences molded and shaped me. But the most significant experience came from completing my Eagle Project, during which I recorded the oral histories of eight war veterans from World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. As I listened to their stories, I learned the meaning of self-sacrifice. The project took 140 hours—longer than a typical Eagle Project, but while I was working on it, I was not thinking about the time I was spending or even whether I would make Eagle if I completed the project. My only focus was on preserving the history of these noble citizens. That is when I understood why I felt no different the night my Scout leaders named me an Eagle Scout. It was because what was inside of me—a commitment to public service and a willingness to sacrifice—had been there all along. Also by Ryan Eberlie

Reading well-reviewed essay samples is something I did when crafting my own personal statement, and it definitely paid off! If you’re looking for more amazing personal statements to draw inspiration from, I’d highly recommend checking out the accepted essay collection from Johns Hopkins university

Now that you know what good writing sounds like, there are only a few more things you need to know to knock your personal statement out of the park! Firstly, try to place yourself in the admission’s officer’s shoes and connect your experience to what’s most relevant to them.

Consider, how will this experience help me at the school I’m applying to? What kinds of students are they really looking for? Have they seen an essay like mine before; is the story I’m telling unique enough? Use these questions to guide your writing, and connect your essay’s conclusion to your future ambitions. This, in itself, is a recipe for success!