How to Win a Tylenol Scholarship

If you're planning on pursuing an education or career in health care, you should definitely check out the Tylenol Future Care Scholarship, a merit-based award meant for undergraduate and graduate students who are enrolled in any of a wide variety of health care programs, including public health, health education, med school, nursing, and even pharmaceuticals.

We'll talk about the eligibility requirements and the application process first before discussing tips and strategies you can use to optimize your chances of winning a Future Care Scholarship.

What Is the Tylenol Future Care Scholarship?

The Tylenol Future Care Scholarship is for college seniors or graduate students interested in pursuing an education and career in health care. Its aim is to take financial stress off of promising students so that they can focus on their studies and long-term career goals.

The scholarship program's motto is "The Future Needs You," and so as you might imagine, ideal applicants are bright, career-oriented, focused students who have strong leadership potential.

Each year, 35 students receive Tylenol Future Care Scholarships. These are non-renewable, one-time awards. So if you've won in the past, you are not eligible to reapply.

For the 2022 competition, two scholarship award levels will be given out to 35 winners:

• 10 $10,000 scholarships
• 25 $5,000 scholarships

In order to receive the award, you must be enrolled continuously, full-time, at a program that falls within the eligibility requirements described in the next section.

Note: High schoolers are not eligible for this scholarship. If you're a high schooler looking for a scholarship for college, read this article instead.

Are You Eligible for the Tylenol Scholarship?

To be eligible for the Tylenol Future Care Scholarship, you must meet all the following criteria:

• Be a resident of the US (including Puerto Rico)

• If you are an undergraduate:
  • Must be a college senior who has been accepted to and plans to enroll in a graduate program in 2022-2023
  • Must provide proof of enrollment to a graduate program in medical school, nursing, or pharmacy
  • The graduate program must be based in an accredited, nonprofit, two- or four-year US institution

• If you are a graduate student:
  
  • Must provide proof of enrollment to a graduate program in medical school, nursing, or pharmacy
  • The graduate program must be based in an accredited, nonprofit, two- or four-year US institution
  • Must have one or more years of graduate school remaining

• Applicants and/or their family members cannot be employees of Johnson & Johnson Consumer Inc., McNeil Consumer Healthcare Division, or ISTS Inc., as well as any of their affiliates, subsidiaries, advertising and promotion agencies.

If you meet all the above criteria, you're on the right track to submitting a successful scholarship application.

What Do You Need to Apply for the Tylenol Scholarship?

Unlike many other academic scholarships, the Tylenol Future Care Scholarship is not need-based. This means that you won't have to submit any financial information for consideration.

Your finances aren't a factor in the Tylenol Future Care Scholarship competition.

In addition to submitting the online application, you will need to prepare the following:

• A résumé
• Your undergraduate and/or grad school GPA (if currently in grad school)
• Academic records in nursing, med school, and/or pharmacy
• Two 300-word essays and one 100-word essay focused on your career aspirations (we'll talk more about these shortly)

What Is the Timeline for the Tylenol Scholarship?

The 2022 Tylenol Future Care Scholarship application opened on May 1, 2022. The deadline for applications is June 30th, 2022, at 11:59 pm PT.

All scholarship applications must be submitted online at ISTS. Once you register, enter the program key “Tylenol” to get to the application.

For the first round in the application process, you'll be asked to submit all the materials described above in addition to evidence of any community involvement and/or volunteer service.

Semifinalists will be notified on July 13th, 2022, at which point the semifinalist portion of the application process opens. The deadline for this second application phase (during which you will likely have to submit further materials) is August 10, 2022.

Notifications will most likely be sent to both award recipients and semifinalists not selected for the award on August 30, 2022. Checks will then be issued to winners by September 30th, 2022.

How Can You Use Tylenol Future Care Scholarship Money?

If you are awarded a scholarship, a check made out to your school (not you!) will be sent to your mailing address. It is your responsibility to then take this check to the appropriate office at your school.

Scholarship funds may be applied to tuition, fees, books, supplies, or equipment for classes.

How to Raise Your Chances of Winning a Tylenol Scholarship

An independent selection committee will evaluate the Tylenol Scholarship applications and select the recipients based on the following factors:

• College GPA
• Academic records in medical school, nursing, and/or pharmacy
• Community involvement and/or volunteer service
• Essay content

In the following sections, we'll discuss the best approaches for increasing your scholarship chances when you address each application component.

Your Career Path

You can read about the career paths of several notable scholarship winners here. Unfortunately, detailed info about the future career plans of the most recent scholarship recipients isn’t currently available. But, the 2017 winners of the Tylenol Future Care Scholarship endorsed pursuing the following career paths.

Although it's impossible to know whether a disproportionate number of applicants are medical students (which could account for the high percentage of med school awardees), it seems that this scholarship generally favors future physicians (not to be confused with getting a doctorate degree):

College GPA

If you're applying for this scholarship, you've probably already graduated from college or are very close to finishing up. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to boost your GPA after the fact.

If you experienced any hardships or extenuating circumstances that negatively affected your GPA, come up with a tactful way to explain those circumstances in one of your essays. This will be especially effective if you frame a hardship as a factor that's motivated your career path.

For example, if you experienced an illness or injury which prevented you from performing at your best academically, explain how that challenge ultimately inspired your health care career choices.

This guy's injury to his writing hand definitely didn't make term papers any easier.

Academic Records

Are you already enrolled in a graduate program that would qualify you for this scholarship? Your academic records are your chance to prove that you're invested in a particular career path.

You can strengthen this component of your scholarship application if you're still an undergraduate by strategically selecting your classes.

If you're interested in applying to medical school or nursing programs, for example, you could demonstrate commitment to your career path by meeting all pre-med requirements. If you're interested in public health or health education, see whether you could take any classes at your university's school of public health.

Ultimately, one of the best ways to improve your chances of winning the Tylenol Scholarship as an undergraduate or grad student is to focus on your academic studies and overall performance. If you're a strong student, you'll be a strong applicant for not only the Tylenol Scholarship but also other merit-based scholarships, graduate programs, and even future jobs.

Community Involvement & Volunteer Service

You probably figured that the Tylenol Future Care Scholarship program heavily weighs applicants' community involvement based on its motto: "The Future Needs You."

It's clear that the strongest applicants will be those who are dedicated to service—that is, helping others—as professional health care specialists or providers. One way to stress your dedication to service before you actually start a career in health care is to engage in relevant volunteer work and/or community involvement.

If you are applying or have already applied to medical school, chances are you have some health care-related volunteer experience on your résumé.  

But people's interests can change over time. Do your own volunteer/community involvement experiences lend themselves to an easy-to-follow narrative? If your volunteer interests aren't directly related to your current career path, then use them to discuss how your present interests (both academic and professional) have shifted in a logical way.

Focus particularly on any leadership experiences you have. For instance, maybe you served as a club officer or organized a volunteer effort. Strong leadership skills are often valued by corporate scholarship programs because they are expected to predict who will find future success.

If you're already in graduate school and are hoping to earn money toward your education, you'll still have to include this information on your application. Graduate school can be really busy, but competitive applicants make room for community service, too. For example, you can think about volunteering at a free or low-cost clinic in your town. The goal is to have a résumé that shows your dedication to making your community a better place.

In short: programs such as the Tylenol Future Care Scholarship want to invest in scholarship recipients who will effect positive change when empowered through education.

These essays give you the chance to convince readers you're worth investing in.

Essay Content

All applicants will have to submit two 300-word essays and one 100-word essay focusing on your career goals. Past Tylenol Future Care Scholarship winners have been able to articulate why and how they became interested in health care through compelling, logical narratives.

Here are some examples to give you a better idea of what we mean:

• A 2012 winner named Nmandi talked about growing up in Nigeria and the time he met a US-educated physician who came back to his country to provide medical care to its citizens. As a child, Nmandi didn't have access to proper medical care when injured. These experiences shaped his passions and interests, and inspired him to pursue a career in medicine.
  
  
• A 2017 winner, Courtney, understands the strain medical emergencies often put on families and children after witnessing her own mother suffer a stroke and later struggle with simple everyday tasks. She exhibits a passion for service and empathy.
  
  
• Another 2017 scholarship winner named Amid, who already held a Master of Public Health and planned to focus on medicine and public health, has experience as a non-profit founder and global health researcher, showing true dedication to the field of medicine.

You'll have your own reasons for pursuing schooling and a career in medicine. They might not be as dramatic as the examples above, but as long as you're genuine in your three essays, you'll come across likable and authentic.

Here are some tips for approaching your essays:

• Tell a story. Did something or someone spark your interest in health care as a child? Was there one particular experience that made you realize how important medical care/dental care/health education was to you?

• Be humble. This scholarship is for future health care providers—people who dedicate their lives to serving others. Why do you want to serve others? How do you see the opportunity to serve others as a privilege?

• Express gratitude for the scholarship opportunity. How will this scholarship help you in the short term and long term? Your short-term goals should be related to your academic performance, and your long-term goals should be related to your performance as a future health care provider and/or educator.

• Present a polished finished product. Have one to two experienced editors/proofreaders look over your essays before you submit them.

What's Next?

The Tylenol Future Care Scholarship is not the only funding option out there for ambitious college students. Check out our expert guides to the Walmart Scholarship, the National Merit Scholarship, and standardized test scholarships.

Are you a high school senior getting ready to go to college? Then you'll definitely want to look at these awesome scholarships for seniors.

Want to apply for college scholarships but don't have a lot of time or energy? These easy college scholarship applications make the process super simple.