Medium's “Extra Credit” Scholarship (For High School Seniors)

Speaking of students (high schoolers now), Medium just announced a scholarship opportunity for high school seniors, and it sounds awesome.

Via the Medium blog post:

“Share your story.”

It’s what we hope everyone will do when they come to Medium. Stories make the world a better place, and we want to make a better place for everyone to write and share them.

“Share your story” also happens to be one of the most common questions offered in the dreaded college entrance essay.

Every year, thousands of college-bound high school seniors are forced to introspect on a Big Topic. Amid the predictable wall gazing, eye rolling, foot tapping, XBoxing, texting and Snapchatting, actual words are strung together in grammatically correct sentences and arranged in paragraphs with a beginning, middle and end. Thoughts are thunk. Emotions are emoted. Insights are sighted. And when all this teeming energy, confusion and angst comes frothing up as prose. It is promptly appended to an application form, sent off for bureaucratic review and dropped into permanent archival limbo.

Great stories are buried in that annual pile. We intend to find them.

All entries are first read by average Medium readers, and the top 12 as recommended by these readers will be sent to a panel of five best-selling authors to pick the three best of the best.

This isn't a horrible standardized test prompt. The topic is wide open: all you have to do is share your story. If yours is interesting and you have a good mind for writing, don't miss this chance. I certainly would have entered if it had been available last year.