The perfect CV for your scholarship application!

An application for a scholarship mostly starts with the most basic things you can think of: your own life written down onto a piece of paper. Well, so much about easy...

But there are a few tips and tricks to follow in order to make your CV as impressive as possible with as little effort as possible.

It is quite obvious that you need some data before you start your CV. All your personal details, you'll probably have in mind. Still, just right them down, making a list of all the things that need to be in your CV at the end.

Then try and think backwards. Simply go from now into the past and remember what you have been up to that might be of any meaning to the insitution you are applying at. So, for example your current school/university, your current student job, whether you have any volunteering going on right now. Then, think of what you did before this and simply go back in time step by step. Very important rule for this: Nothing is too unimportant! Whatever comes to your mind, don't cross it off the list, jut because you feel like the period was too short, the activity might sound boring or you feel like you haven't learnt much there. Simply put it all there! Any tiny information can be helpful (and look good) for a specific institution. You never know where you might end up applying, so everything is valuable in this step.

If you remember, that you e.g. have volunteered in a summer camp a few years ago, but can't tell the exact dates any more, right it down for now and mark it to make sure you can look up the info later. Always right down the starting and ending times, together with a very short and precise description where necessary.

Once you have your things together, it's time to get to your computer. Barely any organisation wants a real paper application these days. Almost everything is done via email or special online platforms.

First, right all the info you have in timeline order and in categories, like education, experience, volunteering, hobbies, personal info and so on. Then try to give this CV a nice look. It does not have to be a week of work to make it look incredible, but give it a consistent colour touch, use the same fonts throughout the document and so on.

Now, you might probably end up with far to much information for these one or maybe two pages the CV should have. But that's totally okay! It's great that you now have a collection of everything and can then maybe cross of things that are not important for the repsective institution, and highlight others that fit better to who they are looking for.

Now that you have your "general" CV together, you can go ahead and adjust it for one specific application.Having this template-like CV is going to speed the entire process up for you, without running into any problems because you forgot to mention anything.

Make sure to include the insitutition's contact details, sign the CV and include the current date. That way it looks like you put a lot more effort into personalising the CV. After that, think about which information is most relevant to them, whether you want to leave out something or if you need to explain anything a little more closely. Especially for this step, try and show your CV to someone who hasn't thought about your life in a document and all  the details as much as you. This can help spotting mistakes, issues in understanding as well as style. Once this is done, check for spellling mistakes one more time, and save the document as a pdf file. And that's it, you're ready to go, with a great CV everyone is going to love!