Weird Talents and Obscure Hobbies That Have Scholarships Attached

There's a scholarship for duck calling. There's a scholarship for making a prom outfit out of duct tape. There's a scholarship for being tall. These are real programs, funded by real organizations, that hand out real money every single year — and most of them get a fraction of the applicants that mainstream scholarships do. If you've ever felt like your particular interests or weird skills don't "count" for anything on a college application, this article is going to change your mind.

The scholarship world is much stranger and much more specific than your guidance counselor probably told you. And that strangeness is exactly where your advantage lives.

The Reality

The big-name national scholarships — the ones everybody knows about — attract enormous applicant pools. We're talking tens of thousands of students competing for a handful of awards. The Coca-Cola Scholars Program, for example, received over 68,000 applications for 150 scholarships in a recent cycle. Those odds are brutal, roughly 0.2%. You should still apply to those if you're competitive, but you should also know that the math is working against you.

Meanwhile, niche scholarships tied to specific hobbies, talents, and interests often get surprisingly few applicants. The reason is simple: most students don't know they exist, and the ones who do sometimes feel like the awards are too weird to be worth their time. That's a mistake. A scholarship that gives you $5,000 and only gets 75 applicants is dramatically better odds than one that gives you $5,000 and gets 50,000 applicants. We'll do that math in a minute.

These scholarships exist because organizations want to promote their niche. A duck calling championship funds a scholarship because they want young people interested in waterfowl hunting and conservation. A duct tape company funds a scholarship because it's brilliant marketing. A bowling association funds scholarships because they want the sport to survive. Their motivation doesn't matter to you. What matters is that the money is there and not enough people are going after it.

The Play

Let's walk through some real examples so you can see the range of what's out there. This isn't a complete list — it's a sampler to rewire how you think about scholarships.

The Chick and Sophie Major Memorial Duck Calling Contest is run by the Stuttgart, Arkansas Chamber of Commerce. High school seniors compete in a duck calling contest, and the winner receives a scholarship. [VERIFY: The scholarship amount has historically been around $2,000 for first place, with smaller awards for runners-up.] You do need to be able to call ducks, but if you hunt or grew up around waterfowl, this is your lane.

Stuck at Prom, sponsored by Duck Brand duct tape, awards scholarships to couples who attend prom wearing outfits made entirely from duct tape. The grand prize has been as high as $10,000 per person in recent years. The contest runs annually, and while it requires creativity and effort, the applicant pool is tiny compared to traditional scholarships. According to Fastweb and Unigo's unusual scholarship listings, this is one of the most well-known "weird" scholarships, yet it still draws far fewer entries than standard essay-based awards.

Tall Clubs International offers the Kae Sumner Einfeldt Scholarship to students who meet their height requirements — typically 5'10" and above for women, 6'2" and above for men. [VERIFY: Current height requirements and award amounts — check tallclub.org for latest details.] If you happen to be tall, this is free money for filling out an application.

The Frederick and Mary F. Beckley Scholarship is available to left-handed students at Juniata College in Pennsylvania. [VERIFY: This scholarship's current availability and whether it remains restricted to left-handed applicants.] There have also been various other left-handed scholarship programs listed on scholarship databases over the years.

The Vegetarian Resource Group offers scholarships of $5,000 and $10,000 to high school students who have promoted vegetarianism in their schools and communities. If you've been vegetarian or vegan and have done anything to advocate for that lifestyle, this one is specifically looking for you.

Skateboarding, bowling, archery, and gaming all have scholarship ecosystems. The USA Bowling scholarship program provides awards through the United States Bowling Congress (USBC) and its youth programs. USA Archery and various state archery associations offer scholarships to competitive archers. Skateboarding scholarships are available through organizations like the Patrick Kerr Skateboard Scholarship [VERIFY: current status of this specific program]. And esports scholarships have expanded significantly in recent years — the National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE) reports that member schools collectively offer [VERIFY: over $16 million in esports scholarships and aid annually], and that number keeps growing.

The point isn't that you should take up duck calling. The point is that whatever you're already into — however niche, however "not college application material" it might seem — there's a reasonable chance somebody is offering money for it.

The Math

This is where it gets really compelling. Let's compare two hypothetical scenarios.

Scenario A: You apply to a well-known national scholarship. It awards 10 scholarships of $5,000 each. It gets 50,000 applicants. Your odds of winning: 10 divided by 50,000 = 0.02%. You'd need to apply to 5,000 such scholarships to have a statistical expectation of winning one.

Scenario B: You apply to a niche bowling scholarship. It awards 5 scholarships of $5,000 each. It gets 75 applicants. Your odds of winning: 5 divided by 75 = 6.7%. That's 335 times better odds than Scenario A. And because the pool is small and self-selecting (only bowlers apply), you're competing against people in your own community rather than against the most decorated students in the entire country.

Even if the niche scholarship is worth less money — say $1,000 instead of $5,000 — the expected value per hour of application time is often dramatically higher. If a national scholarship takes you 10 hours to apply for and your odds are 0.02%, the expected value of that time is about $1 per hour. If a niche scholarship takes you 3 hours and your odds are 6.7%, the expected value is over $22 per hour even at the $1,000 level. That's not a trivial difference.

This doesn't mean you should only apply to niche scholarships. It means your overall strategy should include them, and you should probably prioritize them over yet another long-shot national application.

What Most People Get Wrong

The number one thing that stops students from applying to niche and unusual scholarships is embarrassment. They feel silly applying for a duck calling scholarship, or they think a duct tape prom contest is beneath them, or they worry that a bowling scholarship won't "look good." Here's what you need to understand: the money spends the same. A $5,000 scholarship from the world's weirdest organization reduces your tuition bill by exactly the same amount as a $5,000 scholarship from the most prestigious foundation in America. Nobody at your college will know or care where the money came from. They'll only know that your bill is lower.

The second mistake is not knowing where to look. The big scholarship databases — Fastweb, Scholarships.com, and Unigo — all have filters and categories for unusual or niche scholarships. But the real gold is in searching for the national association or governing body of whatever your hobby is. Almost every organized activity in America has a national association, and a surprising number of them offer scholarships. Type "[your hobby] + national association + scholarship" into a search engine, and see what comes back. Do the same with "[your hobby] + scholarship" on Fastweb and Scholarships.com.

The third mistake is not casting a wide enough net when you inventory your own interests. Students tend to only think about their "main" extracurricular activities. But scholarship-eligible hobbies and talents include things like: knitting, gardening, amateur radio, creative writing in specific genres, playing a specific instrument, speaking a specific language, collecting things, cooking, sewing, woodworking, photography, calligraphy, coding, chess, fishing, martial arts, dance styles, and dozens more. If you do it regularly and enjoy it, search for it.

Here's your tactical move: sit down for 30 minutes and list every hobby, skill, interest, talent, and weird thing you're good at. Don't edit yourself. Include the stuff you think is embarrassing or irrelevant. Then spend one hour per item searching for associated scholarships. You'll likely find at least three to five you'd never heard of, with applicant pools small enough to give you a real shot.

One hour of searching could surface thousands of dollars in opportunities that 99% of students will never find. That's not a metaphor. That's the actual math.

This article is part of the 5 Things That Get Scholarships You Didn't Think About series at SurviveHighSchool.

Related reading: The Specific Types of Community Service That Actually Win Scholarships, Your Parents' Jobs, Your Background, and 50 Scholarships You Already Qualify For, Regional Awards That Pay More Than National Ones (With a Fraction of the Competition)

Sources:

• Fastweb, unusual and unique scholarship listings, fastweb.com
• Scholarships.com, unique scholarship awards database, scholarships.com
• Unigo, weird scholarships list, unigo.com
• Stuttgart Arkansas Chamber of Commerce, Chick and Sophie Major Memorial Duck Calling Contest, stuttgartarkansas.org
• Duck Brand Stuck at Prom Scholarship Contest, stuckatprom.com
• Tall Clubs International, tallclub.org
• The Vegetarian Resource Group scholarship program, vrg.org
• United States Bowling Congress (USBC) youth scholarship programs, bowl.com
• USA Archery scholarship resources, usarchery.org
• National Association of Collegiate Esports (NACE), nacesports.org