Reflection Into Responses: How to genuinely craft your application responses while avoiding the GenAI trap

I get it. You want to use Generative AI to write your scholarship application responses. As someone who taught college communication courses for almost 20 years, I am firmly saying, don’t do it. 

Why, you ask? Because we want the real you. The fun, funky, celebrated, scared sometimes, bold most times, raw, plucky, and authentically you. The you in words and sentences, not in GenAI prompts.

Does that mean you should not use GenAI at all? Of course not. Use GenAI to support you, but not be you. Use GenAI when, after you have answered all the application questions, you read back through what you wrote and just cannot make that one sentence fit. GenAI can also be a good overall editor in other ways such as checking grammar and ensuring you addressed each question. 

If you are unsure of how to get started with the application, check out Brooke’s Rural Gone Urban Foundation’s blog post on Crafting Your Bio, which offers a process you can follow for responding to questions. Think through each question’s purpose, brainstorm key points, and create an outline. Use that outline to tell your story just as if you were talking to the scholarship committee. 

We want to feel what you have felt through a story that comes from your gut and your heart. Of course, there is also something in this for you because there is life-giving value in the process of applying for scholarships. Scholarship applications, especially the RGUF application, offer you the opportunity to reflect. GenAI cannot reflect for you. That is something only you can do.

And reflection is power. Reflection offers perspective, self-awareness, gratitude and the retrospective sense-making that allows you to contemplate and learn from your past and plot your destiny. 

If life has had you driving mostly dusty backroads and you are visualizing yourself cruising through a cityscape, you need to map those directions. How are you going to get there? Do you need to make a u-turn soon? What if you hit a detour? Always be on the lookout for an alternate route that just might take you somewhere better. That is how life works. 

So embrace the writing process – the messy, peel-the-layers-back process to bring forth the real you in each scholarship application answer. Go deep, think hard, learn, and flourish through the writing process. Know when and how to use GenAI (hint: it is not to do reflective writing for you). Doing so will not only make your scholarship application essays better; it will better prepare you for the writing you will do in post-secondary school.