Chip Taulbee is editor of the Mensa Bulletin, the member magazine of American Mensa, where he sets the editorial direction and oversees the magazine’s production each issue. He also supports the Mensa Foundation’s communications and editorial efforts.
Every year, hundreds of Mensa Foundation volunteers read thousands of scholarship essays about the future. Not predictions. Plans.
They are judging submissions for the Mensa Foundation Scholarship Program, a decades-old flagship initiative of American Mensa’s philanthropic partner. For the 2026 cycle, some 600 judges are reviewing roughly 33,000 essays from students across the country. Each one is short — no more than 550 words — and attempts to answer the same question: What do you plan to do with your life, and how will you get there?
Judging runs from February through April each year. By the time it ends, those volunteers will have spent many hours reading about careers not yet begun and plans just starting to take shape. From that large pile of ambition, the Foundation will award about $185,000 in scholarships ranging from $600 to $7,000.
How the judging works
Judges include both Mensans and nonmembers, and many read hundreds of essays during the judging period. Penelope A. Smith-Singleton, who worked through 134 entries this year, has been judging long enough to remember when the process involved gathering at someone’s home and passing around stacks of printed essays.
Today, the reading happens online through a judging portal, but the basic task has not changed much: Read carefully and score each essay based on how clearly a student explains their goals, how persuasively they connect those goals to experience, the quality of the writing, and whether the voice feels original and genuinely their own.
The criteria are straightforward. Applying them thousands of times, however, becomes its own kind of education.
What stands out in a strong essay
The essays that stand out tend to make their case quickly. Judges see plenty of moving stories, some difficult to read without pausing for a beat. But an emotional anecdote alone rarely carries the day. What judges are really looking for is evidence that a student has already begun moving toward the future they describe.
Smith-Singleton has some straightforward advice for applicants: “Put the career goal in the first paragraph, preferably in the first sentence,” she said. “Then provide the why and the support, what the applicant has already done or plans to do to work toward that goal.”
Mike Curl, who has judged essays for two years and read nearly 300 this cycle, noticed the same pattern. “The best essays showed a clear path to their goal,” Curl said. “In those essays, I understood what they wanted to do, what they had already done to progress toward it, and what specific plans they had to succeed.”
A generation getting specific
What stands out to judges is how concrete many essays are. Students increasingly describe specific paths forward rather than broad hopes for the future.
“While some essays were unrealistic, most were specific and pragmatic about their goals and the future,” Curl said.
That clarity sometimes shows up in unexpected places. Curl said he was struck this year by how often applicants mentioned sonography, a specialized field of medical imaging that appeared in several unrelated essays.
Fran Rush noticed similar patterns in the essays she reviewed. “There were 22 interested in various engineering degrees and about 20 in medicine, from physicians to nursing and sonography,” she said. One thing surprised her: None of the applicants she read expressed an interest in education or academic research.
Reading in the age of AI
In recent years, the judging process has adapted to a new challenge. Before essays reach volunteer readers, the Foundation runs them through software designed to flag submissions that include identifying information because essays are supposed to be anonymous. The system also identifies entries that appear likely to have been generated largely by artificial intelligence.
Judges themselves are not asked to determine whether an essay was written by artificial intelligence, but the question inevitably comes up after hours of reading student writing.
“Some essays felt like they were being padded with words from a thesaurus, or AI, to emphasize each point,” Curl said. Those essays were still scored, he noted, but occasionally flagged for review.
Smith-Singleton said the opposite can sometimes feel more authentic. “Actually, a few errors make an essay more believable,” she said.
What the judges take with them
What stays with judges after a long stretch of reading is the sheer variety of ambitions they encounter.
“There is a wide range of personalities and talents interested in pursuing their future,” said judge Xena Tisdale. “From basic physical athletics and health care all the way to bioengineering and architecture. Every talent is appreciated, and together they will make the cohesive society of tomorrow.”
“The students who write these essays deserve careful readers, and that is what our judges give them,” said Jill Beckham, Director of the Mensa Foundation. “We are grateful for the hours they spent and the attention they brought to it.”
Collectively, the essays form a kind of informal portrait. Not a survey or a study — just thousands of people explaining what they plan to do with their lives. Smith-Singleton summed up this year’s batch in a single line: “Full of idealism, with just a dash of pragmatism.” After 33,000 essays about the future, it is a balance that leaves one optimistic about what comes next.
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