Only For You Too

By Maura Burd

12 min read

Why does it matter? Because the credentials that win scholarships aren't the ones you think you need.

Here's what nobody tells you about scholarship committees: they're not looking for the spotless life. The 4.0, the uninterrupted record, the applicant who's never been knocked sideways — that's not what wins.

Maura Burd figured this out by living the opposite and winning anyway. She's a Gates and Coca-Cola Scholar who built her application out of circumstances most students spend their essays trying to minimize. The students she profiles carry even heavier histories — and they didn't just get in. They swept the biggest national scholarships in the country.

What follows is her field guide for how they did it, and for starting to see the story you've been living as something other than a liability.

The Credentials That Win Scholarships Aren't the Ones You Think

Who actually wins scholarships? If you've looked at an application and quietly decided it wasn't meant for someone like you — someone whose family is stretched thin, whose home is complicated, who's already carrying more than most adults — that assumption is worth examining.

The author of this book won the Gates Millennium Scholarship, the Coca-Cola Scholars award, and enough additional funding to graduate completely debt-free. Before any of that, by her own account, life had spent years trying to convince her she wasn't good enough. She doesn't name the specifics of what happened — deliberately, because the point isn't her particular hardship. The point is what she did with it. She kept a journal, not to log events but to argue back at the voice telling her she was stuck — to write her way out of the moment and into something that felt possible. She found songs that could get her out of her own head when rational thought was making everything worse. She held onto the belief that better days were coming, which is harder than it sounds when nothing around you confirms it. What the scholarship committees ultimately saw wasn't a polished, perfect student. They saw someone who had moved through real difficulty with real determination — and that, it turns out, is exactly what they were looking for.

The Gates Foundation and Coca-Cola Scholars program aren't awarding money to students who've never had to fight for anything. They're looking for evidence that you faced something real and kept moving. A student whose life has been genuinely hard has something to show in that space that a student with a smooth path simply doesn't.

The students who read an application and assume they're the wrong type are often the students those programs were designed to find. The gap isn't in your story. It's in the willingness to put it on paper and get it in front of the right people.

The Two Students Who Should Have Lost — and What They Did Instead

The summer before his senior year, Samson Lim flew to San Francisco to have electrodes implanted in his brain.

It started with a sprained ankle in third grade. The injury triggered dystonia, a neurological movement disorder, and by sixth grade he was in a wheelchair. In high school, surgeons placed a pump filled with muscle relaxant into his abdomen to ease the symptoms. That bought him enough function to keep going. The brain surgery was supposed to go further: nine hours total, three of them while he was conscious on the operating table, two electrodes wired to a pulse generator in his chest. He came out with a set of scars, a long road of physical therapy, and something he hadn't had in a decade: real hope.

Within a year, he no longer needed the wheelchair at all.

And then he applied to 75 scholarships.

Not casually. He estimated the total work across four years of high school at somewhere between 400 and 500 hours. He'd come home from school and search for programs, treating the process like a second job. He understood the stakes — his family had been carrying his medical bills alongside everything else, and adding college loans to that weight was something he'd decided, quietly, he wasn't willing to accept. By spring of senior year he had 18 scholarships, including the Gates Millennium and Horatio Alger awards (which specifically honor students who've risen through significant hardship). He turned some down. He already had a full ride.

What he brought to those applications was a decade of visible struggle and a documented response to it. He'd started a Model UN club when there wasn't one to join. He'd taken on leadership roles — club president, class officer — that had nothing to do with athletic performance and everything to do with showing up consistently when showing up was hard. All of it was real, and all of it was verifiable.

That's not coincidence. The foundations behind these awards have read thousands of applications from students with high GPAs and long extracurricular lists. What separates the winners is evidence of what a person does when circumstances make doing anything difficult.

July Lee's story makes the same case from a different angle. She grew up in Mexicali in a neighborhood with unpaved roads, immigrated to Southern California at six, and settled in a border town that was 97% Hispanic — her family Chinese, navigating a place where they didn't quite fit anywhere. Her father crossed into Mexico each morning to cook at a restaurant. When July was twelve, he was shot during a robbery, placed on life support with traumatic brain injuries, and died without regaining consciousness. Her mother worked seventy-hour weeks at minimum wages across the border to keep four people afloat in America. July bused tables, sold shoes, worked fast food, and crossed back into the U.S. every weekday to attend school.

Her community, by her own account, expected her to fail.

She graduated valedictorian and enrolled at Stanford.

What she put on those applications was an account of how she moved through an environment that offered her almost nothing, and what she intended to do as a result.

The scholarship committees weren't moved by students who had experienced nothing. They were moved by students who had experienced something real and showed what they made of it. If you've been quietly telling yourself your story isn't dramatic enough, or that you don't have the right credentials, you may be misreading what these programs are actually asking for. They're not asking whether life was hard. They're asking what you did when it was.

The Stories You're Most Tempted to Hide Are the Ones the Judges Remember

The part of your story you're most tempted to minimize is almost certainly the part a scholarship committee will remember.

That impulse runs deep. Before clicking submit, every instinct says: lead with the GPA, the club list, the carefully assembled evidence that you have it together. But scholarship committees read hundreds of applications from students who have curated themselves into identical shapes. The one that stays isn't the most polished; it's the one where they feel like they've met someone real. Real people have friction in their stories, and friction, honestly named, is what differentiates you.

Take July Lee's application again. She didn't try to smooth over her background; she built her application from it. She grew up Chinese in a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood, then immigrated at six to a California border town that was 97% Latino. Her family kept Chinese customs at home while she navigated Mexican and then American culture outside the door. She became fluent in Spanish, Cantonese, and English, not as an achievement to list but because her life required it. She called it training. Three languages meant three sets of social codes, three different ways of reading a room, three communities she could walk into and be understood when most applicants could claim one. On paper, that reads as instability — a child caught perpetually between worlds, belonging to none. She presented it as evidence: proof of someone who could operate across the kinds of boundaries that stopped other people. Every friction in her story was capability, not a problem to explain away.

That reframe doesn't require extreme hardship. It requires accuracy and nerve: the willingness to look at the difficult parts of your history and ask what they taught you rather than what they cost you. The question underneath every application essay isn't "how hard was your life?" It's "what did you do with what you were given, and what does that tell us about you going forward?" A student who served as a caregiver, worked through high school, or grew up in a household built on financial fear doesn't have a weaker story than the scholars in this book. They have a different one. Committees aren't ranking adversity. They're reading for the through-line: here is what I faced, here is what I did, here is where I intend to go.

The polished, cautious applications blur together. The one that admitted something true — and then showed what the student built from it — is the one that gets remembered.

The Scholarship Process Has a Protocol — and Most Students Skip It

Crafting the right story is only the beginning.

I thought I was preparing seriously for the SAT. I wasn't even close.

That became clear through Jay Rosner, who ran test-prep programs through the Princeton Review Foundation. His version of serious: 90 focused minutes of practice per day, five to six days a week, for five to six weeks, with at least three or four full timed tests before the real one. I hadn't done any of it, and I spent years compensating elsewhere for the scores that kind of preparation would have produced.

Test prep is just one piece of a system most students never see. They scroll through lists, apply to whatever seems promising, and treat rejection as proof that the process is unpredictable. The students who come out ahead aren't luckier. They're working from a map.

The application worksheet is part of that map. For each scholarship you're considering, it captures the eligibility requirements, deadline, required materials, and your assessment of fit. The point isn't record-keeping for its own sake — it's decision-making. With everything in one place, you stop choosing from memory and start choosing from information: which programs deserve your time, which don't, where the hours actually move the needle.

But the most overlooked part of the system is probably already in your house.

Parents tend to treat the scholarship process as the student's domain, which is right. The essays, the narrative, the voice in the applications belong to you alone. But the work surrounding that creative core can be delegated. Finding programs and filtering out the ones that don't fit takes hours. Building the list, organizing deadlines, running mock interviews until the awkwardness gives way to fluency: all of it can be shared. When it is, you recover time, and time is what you spend on the applications themselves, which is the only part no one else can do.

One rule keeps parent involvement from crossing a line: ask whether you'd be comfortable if the judges knew what your parent was doing. That covers every gray area. Searching for programs: yes. Catching typos in a final draft: yes. Running through interview questions until you stop freezing: yes. Rewriting a paragraph because the phrasing wasn't landing: no. The application represents you, and the moment the writing becomes collaborative, it represents someone else.

I credit my mother directly with a meaningful share of my scholarship success. Not because she wrote anything, but because she searched, organized, listened, and ran through interview questions until the discomfort faded. That's the strategy — one that leaves your voice completely intact and frees the hours to make one more strong application possible.

Scholarships Don't Just Pay for College — They Buy the Freedom to Become Someone New

Maura Burd sat in her first college classes without a shift starting afterward. For years that hadn't been an option — school had always competed with work, financial scrambling, the quiet hum of economic fear. The Gates Foundation and Coca-Cola Scholars program had changed the equation: tuition, fees, living expenses, covered. What she hadn't anticipated was how much of her mind came back when the pressure lifted.

She spent her weekends touring as the lead singer of a band. Her classmates were picking up shifts at the coffee shop and the bookstore; she was on a stage Friday night and back in the library on Monday. Not because she had unusual discipline. Because she had time. She had the hours to get good at playing live, to build a following, to drive to a gig that might draw forty people and do it again the following week. She had the hours to show up twice in a city, then three times, to be remembered rather than just met. Those trips eventually pulled her into Nashville's music industry, into rooms with Hall of Fame producers and Grammy-winning songwriters. Those aren't people who take meetings with students who can only make it out once a semester. She went enough times that it mattered.

That was one thread. She also turned her grades around: started rough, finished her master's program at a 4.0. She built a marketing company that worked with Fortune 500 clients. She fell for someone who, as she tells it, knocked her completely off her feet.

College graduates earn nearly $22,000 more per year on average than people who stopped at a high school diploma. That number is real. But it measures what happens when you go. It doesn't measure what happens when you go free. When financial anxiety stops occupying mental space, something else fills it. For Burd, what filled it was a life she couldn't have built on a fractured schedule.

None of those things were paid for by the scholarship. They were made possible by it: the weight it lifted, the hours it returned, the mental space it cleared. The scholarship bought something that doesn't appear on any tuition bill — enough presence in her own life to let it actually happen.

Committees who fund students know this, which is why they look for people who've already shown what they do when resources are scarce. The students who fought hardest to get there are the ones likeliest to do something with the space once they arrive. Burd wrote this book as someone who came through that door and wants you to follow. She had the good fortune of finding her way through, and she wrote it all down so you don't have to figure it out alone. If you pursue scholarships, you're not just deciding how to fund four years of school. You're deciding who you get to become once the weight is off.

The Door You Walk Through Is Never Just Yours

The rule, as Burd tells it, is simple: when a door opens for you, hold it for whoever's behind you. She's quoting Obama, and she means it — but so do I. What Burd did that's more lasting is write it down. This book is what holding the door looks like when you decide to do it at scale.

That shift changes what you're actually deciding when you sit down to apply. You're not solving a money problem, though you will. You're doing the work that earns you the cognitive and emotional room to become someone you can't quite imagine yet — someone who studies without dread, who shows up fully, who finds out what she's capable of when survival isn't the only item on the agenda. And then, when you've arrived, you'll understand what Burd understood. The door was never only meant for you. You were always supposed to be the one holding it.