• Summer work, scholarships, college applications - opportunities abound, but you often need help getting through the door.
• Impress the adults in your life and some of them may decide to help you out.

How do I make a positive impression?

• Work hard and be a scholar - spend time reading and studying and taking the initiative. 
• Spend more time learning and making the campus a better place and less time absorbed in watching videos, playing games and checking social media. Having your nose perpetually buried in your phone, headphones plugged into your ears...these are ways of tuning out what’s going on around you, and they generally do not make a positive impression on people who write recommendations.
• Take the lead on group projects, turn work in on-time (or early - imagine that!).
• Save and share copies of your projects so that a teacher can be reminded of what you have done (I often list some of your better work in my letters). Good work should go in a portfolio, not in the trash. 
• Make an impression in the work you do and the discussion you engage in.
• Be constructively vocal in class...ask and answer questions. Fight the urge to stay quiet. Sorry, but a student who is more constructively vocal in any class (especially one in the social sciences) makes a better impression, gets remembered and tends to get a much better recommendation.
• Create a resume or a list of accomplishments that include what you have done in class, on campus (in and out of class), and in other organizations around the community. Anything that constitutes a leadership role should be listed. Don't forget to include your objective...what you want to do, where you want to go, what you're applying for, etc.  
• Make certain that your teacher knows what the scholarship is for and send them a copy of the resume / brag sheet as soon as they agree.

• Respect the difficulty of writing recommendations - good ones take time and attention. 
• Ask first in person and then by follow up with an email.
• Allow teachers at least a two week turn around. It’s even better to pose the idea further out, then formally ask about a month out. Then the two week turn around time becomes just a polite reminder from you.

• You haven’t allowed enough time.
• You haven’t made your best impression.