The Frederick & Mary F. Beckley Scholarship is $1,000 per year. It is awarded exclusively to left-handed students at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania. The eligibility requirement is exactly what it sounds like: be left-handed.
It gets approximately 50 applicants per year. That's a 1-in-50 shot — a 2% win rate. Compare that to the Gates Scholarship (0.003%) or most major national awards (well under 1%). The money is real. The requirement is real. And the competition is almost nobody.
This is not a quirky trivia item. It's an illustration of how scholarship math actually works — and why the “weird” ones are often the most rational ones to pursue. Most students scroll past them because they seem too strange to be serious. That's the arbitrage opportunity.
Why Unusual Scholarships Exist (And Why the Odds Are Real)
Every unusual scholarship has a story behind it. The Beckley scholarship exists because Frederick and Mary Beckley were left-handed and cared deeply about it. Donors fund what they loved — their ethnic heritage, their hometown, their sport, their industry, their physical trait. When they set up a scholarship, they narrow the eligibility to reflect exactly that.
Foundation money also has rules. Charitable foundations are legally required to distribute funds on a regular cycle. If nobody applies — or too few people apply — the award still gets distributed, sometimes with lower standards in subsequent cycles. The money doesn't disappear back into someone's pocket. It finds a recipient.
The result is a wide category of awards where the applicant pool is tiny by design. While a big national scholarship might draw 500,000 applications for $25,000 (odds: 0.003%), a niche community foundation award with 10 applicants offers a 10% chance at $1,000. Apply to ten of those and the math starts working in your favor fast.
The question isn't whether these scholarships are “real money.” They are. The question is whether you can find the ones you qualify for — and whether you'll actually apply. You don't have to be a senior to start this search, either.
🎯 5 Real Weird Scholarships (With Dollar Amounts and Where to Find Them)
These are verified, active awards. Each one is real money — and most students have never heard of them.
Frederick & Mary F. Beckley Scholarship: $1,000 for left-handed students at Juniata College. Approximately 50 applicants per year. juniata.edu.
Chick and Sophie Major Memorial Duck Calling Contest: $2,000 for high school seniors who can call ducks. Held in Stuttgart, AR — the "Duck Hunting Capital of the World."
Patrick Kerr Skateboard Scholarship: $5,000 (renewable) for skateboarders with a 3.0 GPA and community involvement. patrickkerrskateboardscholarship.org.
National Potato Council Scholarship: $10,000 for students pursuing careers in agriculture or the potato industry. nationalpotatocouncil.org.
Tall Clubs International Scholarship: $1,000 for women 5'10"+ and men 6'2"+. tallclub.org.
Categories of Unusual Scholarships (And What Falls Into Each)
Unusual scholarships aren't random — they cluster into predictable categories. Once you know the categories, finding them becomes a search strategy rather than a luck-based treasure hunt.
Physical Traits and Heritage
Left-handedness (Beckley), height (Tall Clubs International), and hair color (Redhead Days scholarships for natural redheads) all qualify students for real awards. So do surnames — the Van Valkenburg Memorial Scholarship is available to students descended from Van Valkenburg family lines, and the Gatling Scholarship targets Gatling family descendants. Narrow ethnic heritage backgrounds often have their own foundation awards with applicant pools in the single digits. If your family has a distinctive heritage, search it.
Hobbies and Skills
Skateboarding (Patrick Kerr), duck calling (Chick and Sophie Major), knitting (National NeedleArts Association), bagpipe playing, and marching band are all scholarship-eligible skills. These awards tend to come from associations and clubs organized around the activity — and because those organizations are small, their scholarship applicant pools are small too. If you've ever thought of your hobby as “just a hobby,” search it with the word scholarship next to it.
Hometowns and Geography
Community foundation scholarships tied to specific cities, counties, or even zip codes are among the most underused awards in existence. These are funded by local donors who specifically want to support students from their community — and because almost nobody outside that community knows they exist, applicant pools often range from 5 to 30 students. A $1,000 award with 8 applicants isn't rare. It's standard at the community foundation level.
Career-Specific and Industry Awards
The potato industry (National Potato Council, $10,000), funeral services (American Board of Funeral Service Education), horse breeding, and underwater welding all have dedicated scholarships. These are funded by industry associations trying to attract talent to fields that need it. The requirement isn't unusual accomplishment — it's stated career intent. If you're considering any non-mainstream field, there's a better-than-average chance an association already has a scholarship waiting.
How to Actually Find These Scholarships
The challenge with unusual scholarships is that they're scattered — no single database captures them all. The strategy is to search from multiple angles simultaneously.
Search string formulas that work: Try “[your city or county] community foundation scholarship,” “[your state] [your hobby] scholarship,” and “[your surname] scholarship.” Each of these surfaces different awards than a generic scholarship search will find.
Use filter tools correctly. Fastweb and Scholarships.com both allow filtering by major, interest area, ethnicity, and state. Most students search generically — searching narrowly finds the niche awards. Filter to your specific state, then add hobby or interest filters to see what surfaces.
Talk to your school counselor. Counselors often know about local awards that never make it into national databases — awards from local businesses, civic organizations, and community foundations that notify the school directly. These are often the smallest pools and the best odds.
Check your parents' employer and union. Many employers offer dependent scholarship programs, and if a parent belongs to a union, there are almost always dependent scholarship programs attached to the union. These tend to have very few applicants — employees often don't realize the benefit exists.
Search professional associations in whatever obscure field you're considering. The association almost certainly has a scholarship fund for students entering the field.
Our scholarship database is also a solid starting point — filtered searches by state and interest area surface options most students miss.
🔑 The 3-Rule Weird Scholarship Strategy
Start with your own traits: Before you open any search tool, make a list: your hometown, your surname, your height, your hobbies, your parents' employer and union membership, and your ethnic heritage. You're looking for things that are unusual or specific. That list is your search strategy.
Local beats national every time: A county community foundation award with 8 applicants is a smarter bet than a $25,000 national award with 80,000 applications. Dollar-for-dollar, your time is better spent finding 10 local awards than pursuing one prestigious national one.
Apply in October: Many unusual scholarships have November–January deadlines. Almost nobody knows they exist until late in the cycle — which means October applicants are competing against fewer people. Being early in a low-awareness window is itself a competitive advantage.
Ready to build your full scholarship list — weird and otherwise?
The Ultimate Scholarship Search Toolkit ($22) walks you through exactly how to find, track, and apply to the awards most students overlook — from community foundation searches to employer programs to the niche awards that actually win.
Get the Scholarship Toolkit — $22The Application Isn't That Different
Students sometimes assume unusual scholarships have unusual requirements. They mostly don't. Most still ask for the same package: a short essay (200–500 words), a transcript, and a recommendation letter. The process is familiar.
What changes is the essay angle. For any niche scholarship, the winning approach is to lean into the qualifying trait or background — not to treat it as a technicality that happens to make you eligible. A committee reviewing the left-handed scholarship doesn't want an essay that says “I am left-handed and I work hard.” They want to know what that actually means.
For the Beckley scholarship, the natural angle is lived experience: the smudged ink on your writing hand, the spiral notebook that never quite fit, the scissors at every elementary school desk designed for someone else, the guitar or desk designed for right-handers that you adapted to anyway. That experience — navigating a world designed for someone else — is a story about adaptability and resilience. You don't need to announce that framing. Write the specific experience honestly and the committee will draw the conclusion themselves.
The same logic applies to every niche category. For a surname scholarship, explain what that family name means to you. For a hometown award, show your roots. For a hobby-based scholarship, write about the moment the skill clicked or the community it connected you to. Being specific about why this scholarship resonates with you scores higher than a generic “I'm a hardworking student” essay — because specificity reads as genuine, and genuine applications win.
Our guide on how to write a scholarship essay that wins covers the full framework, including how to structure a short-form essay that reads as authentic rather than rehearsed.
Stacking Unusual Scholarships on Top of Traditional Aid
One of the most common misconceptions about niche scholarships is that they're a replacement strategy — something you pursue instead of FAFSA or merit aid. They're not. They stack on top.
Most unusual scholarships have no income limit and no GPA minimum. They don't care whether you received Pell grant money or institutional grants. They exist independently of your federal aid package. A student who wins the Beckley scholarship doesn't have their Pell grant reduced. They just have an extra $1,000 — on top of everything else.
A student who identifies 4 niche scholarships they're genuinely eligible for — say, a left-hand award, a local community foundation award, a hobby-based award, and an employer dependent scholarship — and wins them all at $500–$1,000 each is adding $2,000–$4,000 per year to their financial aid package. Over four years, that's $8,000–$16,000 in money that most of their peers didn't know to apply for.
For more on building a complete list that combines local, niche, and national awards, see our guide on how to find local scholarships nobody applies for. And check out the top scholarships for high school seniors to see how unusual awards compare to national ones in terms of effort vs. odds. Our full resource library includes tools for building and tracking a complete scholarship application system.
Your 6-Step Action Checklist
List every unusual trait, hobby, heritage, and hometown detail about yourself (or your student) before searching anything.
Search "[trait] + scholarship" for your top 5 traits. Include surname, hometown, height, hobbies, and ethnic heritage.
Search "[your county/city] community foundation scholarship" — these have some of the best odds of any award in existence.
Check your parents' employer HR department and union for dependent scholarship programs. Most families never ask.
Apply to at least 3 unusual scholarships before October 31. Most students won't — which means you're competing against almost nobody.
Stack your wins: every unusual scholarship is on top of, not instead of, your FAFSA aid, Pell Grant, and institutional grants.
The Smart Take on “Weird” Scholarships
Return to the Beckley scholarship for a moment. A left-handed student at Juniata College who applies in 20 minutes has a roughly 1-in-50 shot at $1,000. That's not weird. That's smart.
The real oddity is the hundreds of thousands of students who never apply — because they saw the word “left-handed” and assumed it wasn't serious money, or because they didn't know to look in the first place. Unusual scholarships are an arbitrage opportunity created by low awareness. The students who apply win at rates that simply don't exist anywhere else in the scholarship landscape.
You have traits, hobbies, a hometown, a surname, and a family history that other students don't share. Somewhere in that list is at least one scholarship waiting for someone exactly like you. The only step left is to go find it.