Step 1: Chose the scholarships available for your chosen career path. Make sure you get down all the requirements and you meet them. But don’t overlook the general scholarships that everyone can apply for because a lot of those get overlooked.
Step 2: Get all your thoughts together to write all the essays and all other materials needed to submit to the right groups.
Step 3: Procrastinate! Sit down at that blank screen and stare at that blinking cursor as your mind becomes a vast blank barren landscape that no idea has ever lived in or ever will be.
You start to worry about your life and future endeavors and if school is even worth it because you’re already struggling to afford it. So what’s the point of going in more debt?
Then your mind shifts to that one actor in that one show and what they’re doing now or if they’re even still alive, then you do a deep dive into the internet searching for that actor and after twenty minutes you find out they’re living fine with their family in some location you’ve never heard of. You can then breathe a sigh of relief that that one actor from your childhood isn’t dead and is doing fine.
Then you start to wonder about your fifth grade crush and you search Facebook to see what she’s up to. Another half an hour is gone and you’ve find that she is doing great and looks great and then the sadness creeps in because that could have been you by her side laughing standing in the front of the Eiffel tower.
Shake it off and watch some YouTube channels to get your mind off the deep sadness you feel. Get lost for the next four hours. Then look at the clock and see that the whole day is gone and you still have 14 scholarships to apply to before midnight.
Step 4: Panic. Panic and panic some more.
Sit in disbelief knowing that you’ve wasted so much time looking up old crushes and watching YouTube videos and not doing your work.
Blame everyone for your procrastination. From the dog barking 5 blocks away to the subtle one-degree change on the thermostat to the clutter in your room that you made, everyone and everything that isn’t you is responsible for your problems, and they should feel bad!
Step 5: Write.
After enough time blaming the universe for your shortcoming you sit down at your computer, you open a blank page and write like you’ve never written before.
The mixture of panic, adrenaline and the three cans of whatever energy drink you fancy have seemed to open the writing floodgates. The tsunami of words are flowing through your fingertips to the keyboard at a rate that makes it seem as if your keyboard is sentient and you are finally one with the matrix.
You marvel at how good the words appearing across your screen are and you consider just becoming the next J.K Rowling because this isn’t so hard.
Finally, you have finished the last sentence of the last essay for the last scholarship and you sigh. You do the spell check and punctuation check and your paper looks professional. All is good. You did it!
Then you submit everything with an hour to spare and you wonder why you were panicked in the first place. All is right in the world and you can rest easy… until you realize you have another paper for history due in an hour!
Repeat steps 4 and 5.
Justin A. Baker
Staff Writer