The Brag Sheet: Help Us Help Students Earn Scholarships • Tom Law (Associate Professor, Student Affairs)

Bragging is typically considered a negative trait. “Nobody likes a braggart,” people say. But people often like to brag about others—and I’d love to see more faculty brag about their students.

I work with the SCC Foundation to assist with the promotion of, applications for, and distribution of tens of thousands of dollars in scholarships each year. Earning a scholarship is very important for so many of our students—particularly students with greater financial need, underrepresented students, and first-generation college students—and we know it is life changing for some of them. This is especially true as students’ fear of student loan debt makes them hesitant to stay in college.

One way to help with retention of students and make the college more equitable is to help students earn scholarships, from the ones students achieve as they enter SCCC, scholarships that support them while they are enrolled here, and even those scholarships that help them move on to their next institution.

Over the years, I have seen a good number of not only student applications but also faculty letters of recommendation. I’ve seen letters of recommendation that range from two single-spaced pages to just two sentences. Faculty should know that while we might struggle to get enough applicants on some of the smaller scholarships, for some of the larger scholarships, there is competition. 

It is very important, then, for student applicants to provide as much information and supporting evidence as possible, and a lot of them comes from the faculty letters of recommendation. Since I know many faculty are really busy, I am passing along this “JEDI trick,” if you will. When a student comes to you and asks for a letter of recommendation, depending on the degree to which you know the student, ask them to fill out a brag sheet.

A brag sheet is different from a resume or cover letter. The purpose is specifically to help you as a faculty member learn more about a student so you can write the best letter of recommendation possible. Nobody knows what a student has done better than that student, so let them fill this out. 

It would be even more helpful to post a copy of this brag sheet in your Brightspace class website too, maybe in the module that holds the syllabus. Tell students what it is so they know from early in the semester that 1) we do have scholarships that can help with the costs of attending SCCC and 2) if they fill out this brag sheet, they can share it with any person they are asking for a letter of recommendation. Promise them that, in this situation, it really is okay to brag. 

Also, faculty might like to know some of the ways we promote scholarships so you can pass this along to your students as well. 

• Using Argos, we identify eligible students for each of the scholarships we focus on and reach out to them via email and phone calls.
• We host several Zoom workshops for each the major scholarships like Get There From Here, NYS Presidential, Stay on Long Island Initiative (SoLII), and others.
• We do classroom visits (this can be on campus or by Zoom), and we prefer to do those early in the students’ time at SCCC. This is often in college seminar courses, but it doesn’t have to be.
• We encourage faculty to nominate students for the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence. This is not a scholarship, but it is a major point of pride for students to receive a statewide award. It is one of the highest honors they can achieve at SCCC, and it looks great on their applications to four-year institutions. When you first meet students, encourage them to get involved on campus and use the brag sheet to help you write a strong letter of recommendation for them. 

Please contact me if you have questions about how to help all of our students earn the kinds of scholarships that can help them achieve their goals.