@timan2000 your son has received notice of award value (or lack of value) already? My daughter submitted her enrollment verification a couple weeks ago, but she still has not heard anything back yet about the amount. It is a merit scholar award, but it is true that there is also a need based component as well. However, when she received notice that she had been selected as a scholar for 2022, it says as a scholar she has been selected to receive a scholarship of between $500-$5000 based on financial need. She submitted the FAAL back in July and the enrollment verification in September and now she is still waiting to hear what her actual award will be. But based on the wording, I didn’t think anyone who was selected as a non-waitlisted scholar would receive $0. Also, based on old threads, people who won in the past seemed to indicate that the award amounts could be pretty good based more on what you were expected to pay out of pocket.
From what I can remember of the process - there has been a lot of waiting, which hass been frustrating at times, the process is very long and it would be nice if they could get the award of HSF Scholar much earlier, if not the money, so they could use it on other applications and send as updates to college applications. It would be nice if there was visibility into status after you submit things, but there really isn’t. But the application itself I don’t recall being very difficult for my daughter to fill out. (Was there an essay? I don’t recall) Maybe I am forgetting, but I was trying to remember a few days ago because I want her to apply again when it opens in January. It is the rare scholarship you can apply for throughout college and even in graduate school.
edit: Now that I think about it - I think Phase 2, after student became a finalist, there was an essay submission, but I think it was brief.
The other thing I wanted to point out that in addition to the money, there are other opportunities that Scholars can take advantage of if they want to, through the HSF. There is access to internships, job opportunities, training, Scholar Conferences, networking, career services. So, there is the possibility to make much more out of it, if scholars use the resources offered to them. Also, i asked my daughter to check and for the first time, some other scholarship opportunities show up on her portal too. So, yeah the process can be kind of a pain, but 10,000 times easier than the Coca Cola scholarship process that went nowhere because the application was so ridiculously restrictive and clearly they used an algorithm for the first round to see who had the most school only activities.
It has been a very long process and we are still not at the end of the road. However the email you attached is not the right email. He probably received that email 2-4 times, inviting him and then reminding him of the celebrations. They we’re not mandatory because they understood not everybody could travel to one of the 4 cities. Before he received the first invite to the celebration, he should have received an email declaring he was a 2022 HSF Scholar. In that email it would have said he was either waitlisted for a scholarship or that he would received between $500 and $5000. If the former, then yes at this point it is $0, but based on the last several years, a bunch of waitlisted people receive scholarship notifications in December, so there is still hope. If the latter, than he should be receiving between $500 and $5000 and we haven’t been told those results yet. So we are still in a waiting game for another couple months… 
One thing is, I think the organization is not that big compared to the number of applications they receive, so that is why it takes so long to go through the applications.
