Bread Loaf For High School Juniors

<p>Does anyone have any experience with the New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf?
From reading the application I see that it is held each spring for a long weekend and is open to high school juniors.
How competitive is this?
There is a required writing sample for acceptance. Has your son or daughter felt it helped with honing skills? My daughter is interested in screen writing but does not have any formal experience.
Thanks for any specific comments about the program.</p>

<p>Oh btw it is at Middlebury College…I forgot to mention that.</p>

<p>My d did a similar program but not Bread Loaf. The big upside of such a program is meeting many like minded teens. The classes and writing will be enjoyable for a motivated young writer, but it’s only three days, so i would not expect much skill honing. Real writing improvement doesn’t happen overnight.</p>

<p>Our school has sent a student each year, I had the impression they were nominated by the school and not a direct application, but that was just my impression. The kids came back with positive reviews of the weekend.</p>

<p>Thanks for the responses.
I think having the experience writing and receiving feedback from highly motivated peers and writing faculty would make this valuable. I also like the idea of the conference format but there is not much information about the daily schedule itself. IF anyone has any other information about this conference such as how it might compare to other such writing workshops for high school juniors I would be grateful. I want to make sure the expenses of going so far are worth the investment.
We live in NY.</p>

<p>My daughter attended this conference 1 1/2 years ago (she is a college freshman now). At the time, she said it was the best thing she’d ever done. She loves to write, and she valued all of the feedback she received there. Our school either nominates 2 kids, or the conference only takes 2 kids from our school. I do believe the experience helped with her writing, quite a bit.</p>