Admitted to second choice major...but scholarship?

I was recently admitted to the Civil Engineering program at rit and by the title, you can tell that it wasn’t my first choice. I originally applied for biomedical engineering. Today in the mail, I received a letter stating that i would get a $40k merit scholarship(5K/semester). Is this a common occurrence? It really has me confused that they didn’t want to accept me for my first choice, but they offered me money

My guess is that while your application wasn’t competitive for biomedical engineering in particular, they liked what they saw overall. The same happened for me with UMass - got rejected for CS but accepted for Mathematics, and they’re offering merit aid as well.