The last rank, and the hardest paperwork

The order of operations

1. Make Life. Nothing below can start before this.
2. Finish the Eagle-required merit badges. Do not leave Personal Management and Personal Fitness to the end — both take three months of logging.
3. Hold a position of responsibility for six months as a Life Scout.
4. Find a project. It must benefit a religious institution, a school, or the community — not Scouting itself, and not a commercial business.
5. Write the proposal in the current Eagle Scout Service Project Workbook. Get the beneficiary, the Scoutmaster, the committee and the council to sign it — in that order, and all of them before you do any work.
6. Do the project. You plan, develop, and lead. Somebody else swings most of the hammers. Log every hour, from every helper.
7. Write the report, get the beneficiary and Scoutmaster to sign it.
8. Fill in the Eagle Scout Rank Application. Reference letters go straight from the writer to the council — you never see them, and you never carry them.
9. Scoutmaster conference, then the board of review at council.

Things that go wrong

• Starting the project before every signature is on the proposal. The work does not count. It happens every year.
• Using an old workbook downloaded years ago. Always pull the current PDF.
• Not logging helper hours as they happen.
• Asking for reference letters in the final fortnight. Ask early; people are slow.
• A project that is really a donation drive with no planning or leadership in it.

After the board

Council forwards the application to the national office, and the certificate comes back weeks later. The Court of Honor is planned by the family with the troop's help — Troop 3 has an ECOH handbook and a checklist that make it much less work than it sounds.