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Bold Hobbies Scholarship

Funded by
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Bold.org
$500
1 winner$500
Awarded
Application Deadline
May 29, 2022
Winners Announced
Jun 29, 2022
Education Level
Any

Everyone has different hobbies. These passions make life more enjoyable and creative.

Having hobbies is important, whether you pursue them casually or professionally. Hobbies can provide a nice break from stressors in your life and can even help you find your optimal career field.

This scholarship seeks to encourage students to practice their hobbies and passions.   

Any current student may apply for this scholarship opportunity. To apply, tell us about your hobbies.

Selection Criteria:
Ambition, Need, Boldest Bold.org Profile
Graduate School ScholarshipsHigh School ScholarshipsUndergraduate ScholarshipsEssay ScholarshipsWeird Scholarships
Published February 28, 2022
Essay Topic

Please tell us about your favorite hobbies.

150–300 words

Winners and Finalists

Winning Application

Stacy Dong
Chapman UniversityCypress, CA
Before I understood the value of money, my aunt had already been rich in currency. In other words, she was a collector of coins, of cold, hard cash. In first grade, I was introduced to coin collecting when my aunt gifted me her beloved collection of American quarter-dollars. She insisted I hold onto this mismatch of coins from 2003 to the present-day 2012, insisting the collection’s value would pay for my college years. I couldn’t understand why she loved those kitschy coppers so much. And still, she loved me more, inviting me into looking at money not as a transaction but as a symbol of national and mundane history. I don't truly understand my aunt and I never will. In 2019, she died from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and I watched her love strain as her body wrestled with her mind. During this time, I saw money as my mother saw it: as a trade-off for time. If we poured money into her treatment, perhaps the coins would save her in the same way she saved them. For a long time after she was gone, I could not see money as anything but some fickle mistress, whose presence determined life and death but would not promise recovery. I was scared of the role money would play in my life. Recently, I've uncovered my aunt's old collection of presidential dollars, blanketed with a layer of dust. I lay them out before me not, looking at presidential portraits left empty after her death. I will never understand my aunt, but I do understand her love. I collect coins now because I love her, love the history she loved. I collect coins now because I want to make her, even in death, rich in love and currency, complete her journey throughout the ages.
Alexandra Sanchez
California State University-SacramentoSacramento, CA
I think we are too often caught up in the logistics of how we look on paper to a company. But, I think what can tell you the most about me are the things I do every day to survive. Because that is what my hobbies are to me: a means of survival. If I did not have a pen and pencil, the phonics and beats of music, or the pages of sprawled words of everyone else’s stories, I would not be here anymore. I have come to accept that my mental health is something I will always struggle with, and I quickly realized that if I did not find outlets, it would consume me whole. And so, I quickly became engulfed in the world of creative writing. Every letter becomes part of a word, that has the potential to be a part of a sentence in a paragraph, a line in a stanza, or even a word on its own. I have found beauty in combining words, with commas, with hyphens, with semicolons, to be part of a much larger image. I can say the same about music. To hear Billie Eilish sing words of defeat and goodbye in her song, “Listen Before I Go”, was all I needed to know that I could instead write about it than actually do it. And to get lost in someone else’s story, if merely for 200 pages, can and is enough to escape the horrors of my own thoughts. And as I am writing this, I realize that essentially what I am saying is that words and the order in which you put them, matters: my hobbies have quite literally saved my life.

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FAQ

When is the scholarship application deadline?

The application deadline is May 29, 2022. Winners will be announced on Jun 29, 2022.