I’m a little disappointed because I applied to lots of small local scholarships and won very few. I turned everything in on time and wrote excellent essays so I’m not sure what went wrong. Is is possible that I wasn’t picked because my application was too “perfect”? I’m a valedictorian with a bunch of varsity sports and music who wants to be a doctor. Most of the scholarships said they were mostly academic merit based, and I can’t imagine many kids (particularly with school based scholarships) beat me out on the academic front. Are the scholarship committees actually looking for the good (vs excellent) student with a more interesting story? Sorry if this is a bit of rant, I’m just frustrated and I can’t understand what I could have done better (I did get lots of merit aid from my college so I’ll still be able to pay but more scholarships would have been nice).
Many scholarships want particular strengths. When there’s an essay, did you determine what qualities the committee wants to see, then show those in your writing? Were you strategic in this?
None of us sit on those particular scholarship committees, so none of us can tell you what they were looking for. Your guidance counselor might be able to find out more details for you if he/she is pals with any of those committee members.
As you know, the big money comes from the colleges and universities themselves. It was nice that you got some local money, but it also would have been entirely possible for you to not win any of those scholarships. Thank the organizations that have given you money, and move on.
I think you have greatly underestimated the competition.
Your woes remind me of the song lyrics:
“Oh Lord it’s hard to be humble
when you’re perfect in every way.
I can’t wait to look in the mirror
cause I get better looking each day.”
I think you’re right that I underestimated the competition with the local scholarships. The school based academic merit ones still confuse me a little (since I have the highest GPA and second highest ACT score at my school, and my friend who has the highest ACT score didn’t apply to them) but they may have factored in other things such as financial need more than I expected. (Just so you understand I don’t go to a large competitive suburban high school. My school is fairly big but inner city and poor, so the academically competitive kids all know each other very well and we all know each others business (GPA, ACT scores etc)).
I’ve sat on a scholarship committee before. We looked for something very specific beyond grades and scores. Our funders wanted us to identify kids whose full need was not being met by their college- a gap which the family could not bridge.
If you have one a few- then congrats. But most local scholarships are not looking to help a kid “pile up” a stack of scholarships. Were you expecting MORE than a few- and why? Most organizations want to spread the resources around to serve as many kids as possible. We would have been very leery of awarding money to a kid who was already winning awards from other organizations.
Who won last year??? That’s the best indicator of what an organization is looking for btw…
I have sat on scholarship committees where exactly what you say happened. In one case, a girl had gotten into about eight top schools–perfect everything, did everything. The other committee members decided she didn’t need the scholarship because “Stanford will give her all the money” and gave it to a B student instead.
Another time, I was talking to a parent on the committee from our local elementary school, who made a point that: we won’t award it to some Ivy-going student. They get everything and don’t need it.
So, yeah.
Overall, the scholarships in my town rarely go to the top “scholars.”
Those local awards are small and usually only for one year…and they have a LOT of applicants. The fact that you won a few sounds like you won “your share”. There are other high schools in the area, and their Vals/Sals were applying as well.
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was excited get my acceptance to Midd, but unfortunately my family received no financial aid. While my parents say we could make it work if I really want to go there, I would probably end up with more that $40,000 in debt and even that would still strain my parents finances. I received the highest merit scholarship at St. Olaf allowing me to attend for $30,000 a year, ($30,000 less than Midd). I could see myself being happy at both schools, but I am a bit attracted to Midd’s prestige. Finally, I hope to attend med school and become a pediatrician. Would Midd give me a boost when applying to med school or not?
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Sounds like you chose Midd? Is that right?
(Midd will not give you a med school boost)
I’ve been on a scholarship committee where the award went to the less-perfect of the two top candidates. The committee felt that the other applicant was so polished and packaged and over-achieving that they would be fine regardless, but that our money would actually make a difference to the person we awarded it to.
I have served on a few of these scholarship committees, and oftentimes they lean toward kind of an underdog, who maybe has overachieved based on their upbringing and have already beat the odds a bit. Also, this kid doesn’t get the big money from colleges and so this is a way to “change the world” a little more than giving a kid who already has a full or near full ride another $1,000, for example.
Also, most of the time, there are no written criteria for the award, and so the mood of the committee can vary and produce wildly different results from year to year.
I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
Or did you pick Oberlin?
The same thing happened with my S15 last year. I still haven’t been able to make much sense out of it. He won national, state, and regional scholarships which had huge application pools, but was largely unsuccessful with school/local scholarships where he should have been a stand out. Although he had incredible success overall, it really hurts to not receive support from your own community. I don’t know if it is significant or not, but the kids that seemed to win one award after another were from more affluent and prominent families, so at least in our experience it wasn’t a “let’s give an underdog a chance” philosophy.
Why are you digging into the OP’s posting history and why is it relevant to the question OP asks?
Planner, I don’t think the failure to rack up stacks of awards- national, state, regional AND local means “not receive support” from your own community.
Every organization defines its own criteria. The committees I’ve sat on don’t have to worry about the national competitions. We follow the guidelines set by our funders.
And ditto for every other local community scholarship. If the local realtors want to give an award to a kid who grew up in public housing, are you really going to begrudge that kid the $500 which will pay for an Amtrak ticket so he can get home at Thanksgiving and Christmas? If the local hospital foundation decides to give the ten scholarships to kids who have declared an interest in health careers, does it bother you that your engineering or “I’m going to law school” kid didn’t get one?
My organizations have helped kids who otherwise fall through the cracks in the funding sweepstakes. That’s our mission. If your son won national, state and regional scholarships then by definition- we wouldn’t have given him a penny. That doesn’t mean he didn’t get local support- it means he didn’t fit the profile as defined by the donors.
Their money, their goals.
FWIW, we’ve started to get the impression that there is an underdog factor in these smaller scholarship competitions here too. I don’t think you are showing a lack of humility for asking the question; it’s legitimate.
I don’t think it’s lack of support from the community so much as a sense they want to spread the wealth.
To all who sat on these committees, what’s your take on a kid whose school will reduce aid when an outside scholarship is applied (meaning the scholarship can’t be used for an Amtrak ticket or books or EFC because the school reduces grant aid when outside scholarships come in)?
Are you generally willing to work with the kid to apply it a different year, or hold it for grad school, or hope the kid turns it down so another can have it, or what?
I have evaluated these small/local or company-sponsored applications as well. It’s unlikely you weren’t selected because you were too “perfect” - nobody is perfect, number one, but number two generally the evaluating committees like to see strong students.
I agree with other people who said that you might be underestimating your competition. I just evaluated a batch of 10-15 of these yesterday, and the vast majority of the students I evaluated had a 3.7+ unweighted GPA and a long list of varsity sports, community service, musical, and leadership activities at their high schools. (I’m not kidding - almost every single one of them played sports, played an instrument, volunteered somewhere and was on the e-board of 2-3 clubs.) You’ll be surprised to know that those kids are a dime a dozen - no disrespect to the hard work that got you there, it’s just that there are tons of other kids who have it.
When I’m reviewing scholarship applications once a kid hits a certain threshold of academic achievement I turn to other things. Distinguishing between the 3.8 and the 4.0, or the valedictorian and the kid ranked #7 in the class, is like splitting hairs - especially when you’re comparing across schools. For example, I had some applicants from some disadvantaged urban high schools and some applicants from some elite private schools. If one is the valedictorian and one is #5 in their class, how on earth do I compare them? What if one of them goes to a high school that doesn’t rank?
So yes, there’s a certain level of academic achievement you need to hit, but for me at least once you get to the 3.6-3.7+ threshold other things become more important. That’s why scholarships require essays. Some of the scholarships I review for require financial need to be evaluated, and so we take that into account when comparing applicants to each other. Others have a specific purpose - like encouraging passion for a specific field or helping a specific demographic get better access to opportunities. And even if the scholarship is merit based, absolutely a 3.76 student with a more interesting story/cohesive application may get the scholarship over a kid with a 4.0 and a boring essay. And I’ve seen essays that were excellently written in terms of mechanics and structure, but told me nothing about the student themselves or intimated nothing to me about their passions, interests, personality, dreams, goals, etc. And sometimes I’ve seen financial need essays that, astonishingly, say nothing about the applicants’ actual financial need.
I think the number one thing to remember when you are putting together a scholarship application is reviewers are humans, too. They WANT to give the money, but they want to give the money to whoever they think “deserves” it the most. You have to tell a compelling story that fits with the goals of whatever organization is giving out the scholarship for.
We have never had a problem with a kid attending a school which “penalizes” outside money. Mainly because the individual awards are small; we are not trying to reach the kids who can brag that they “stacked” more money than they can use and woe is me, I’m in a higher tax bracket because I won so much outside money ask me how I did it; and the kids we fund are usually needy enough so that one phone call to financial aid is all it takes from one of our board members to make the problem go away.
If we handed the money to the parent via a social worker and said “this is for a winter coat and an Amtrak ticket for Joe’s Freshman year of college” that would work also- and we’ve done that.
Financial aid officers are human. No matter what the “policy” is (and I fully understand the college trying to maximize their limited aid dollars by defunding the kids who end up with the big outside scholarships) they also don’t want to penalize a needy kid who can barely scrape together the funds to show up on campus in August. So we make a phone call.