Helpful, @blossom thank you.
This is an actual question for us as of yesterday - D won a fairly large community scholarship and attends a school that will - according to policy - let her use about 1/4 of it (replace work-study) and reduce their grants for the rest. I’m not sure if she should ask the organization if it can be deferred for grad school or what. She thinks her college might make an exception to allow it to go towards her summer work expected contribution but that’s not what their stated policy is. I’m not sure how to advise her.
@blossom Is your entire post directed toward me? If so I am not sure you interpreted my post correctly. I am certainly not begrudging anyone an Amtrak ticket. I pointed out that those receiving the bulk of the school/local scholarships were “from more affluent/ prominent families.”
I am not sure where this hostility is coming from:
I certainly didn’t imply that he applied for scholarships that he didn’t meet the objectives for.
I was empathizing with the OP that the process can be hard to understand. I did not express bitterness or anger and even mentioned that my S was very successful with other scholarships, I simply said he was hurt.
My guess would be your essays were not interesting. Completely don’t know you or anything, but having been on a scholarship committee, it was the essay that sold us, in the end, on a particular candidate.
For those who are wondering I picked St. Olaf. Midd’s prestige was really the only factor tipping the scales its direction and I’m the oldest of three so I couldn’t rationalize stretching my parents savings. I’ve also grown up always being one of the best students at my school and I’ve realized that I like that status. At Midd I would be average. As far as Oberlin I never loved the school but I felt like I had to consider it when they gave me much more merit than I was expecting.
OP,
Did you have many community service hours. It seems like the kids who win the local scholarships around here are popular kids who are well known for their community service, so when they win it is no surprise to anyone.
I had over 300 hours at one organization so I don’t think that negatively affected me.
My daughter tried for scholarship from her athletic department. There were 5 categories and she earned the maximum points allowed in each category (varsity letters, gpa, community service, etc), so I thought it would come down to the essay on ‘what participating in sports meant to me.’ Nope. It was pretty clear at the award ceremony that the winner (and in her year winners as they picked 2) were preselected. The presenter said things like “these girls have been destined to win since freshman year…” Okay, message received.
One girl in my D’s glass won a number of local awards. She did all the work, drew artwork for a prize, wrote an essay for a prize, won some NHS award which was basically Miss Congeniality. She’s nice. She was not in the top 20 of the class (that was one award she didn’t get), not the highest gpa, not val/sal. She had no financial need. She’s just nice.
Some comments –
Everyone is jumping down this kid’s throat, but there are sometimes situations in which overly competitive kids aren’t awarded local scholarships because the local organizations (sometimes correctly, sometimes not) assume the kid will get money elsewhere. I won multiple uber-competitive national scholarships last year (Coke, Jack Kent Cooke, the top Burger King Scholars award, GE-Reagan, etc etc) and won 0 local scholarships. A director I knew told me point blank it was because they assumed I’d get money elsewhere – unlike in OPs case, they happened to be right.
But. That may not actually be what happened. As OP kind of hints at, scholarship committees are looking for interesting stories. Academic stats are only the tip of the iceberg for scholarships; they’ll help you make cuts, but you won’t win because you were valedictorian. Each and every high school in the country has a valedictorian. So what.
OPs service hours are also low. It sounds crazy, but several hundred hours is no longer competitive for entire categories of outside scholarships. The Coke average is well over a thousand per scholar. It’s possible the OP lives in a highly populated area where other kids beat him/her in service by a wide margin – or maybe the local orgs in their area just happen to be putting a lot of emphasis on service.
I’ve been on these committees before and think the selection is pretty random. I would not worry about it one bit. You’ll have your group of applicants who fit the criteria, and then you as a committee are just choosing who you like the most. Maybe the applicant took a lot of art (and members of the committee love that!) or they volunteered at the nonprofit that a committee member is especially fond of, or any other random connection.
Courtney- the OP stated that he/she DID win national awards. It’s the local ones that didn’t come through.
the time I sat on a local committee (scholarship from my kids’ elementary school, for a kid who’d gone there). this was about 25 years ago. I didn’t know either of the listed kids.
Kid A: got into all the Ivies plus Stanford, val, 1600. extensive EC’s. did research–back before that was common. I still remember the GC’s letter starting “I’ve been waiting four years for the chance to write about this extraordinary young woman…”
Kid B: B student, did a few EC’s. More people knew her mom.
Scholarship went to kid B. “Ivies give merit scholarships, so Kid A doesn’t need this.”
Kid B dropped out, went to jail a few years later for helping bf break out of jail.
Glad character counted. /sarcasm.
Did the local scholarship applications ask for income/EFC? Then they might take need into consideration.
To the OP. You are who you are. What were you planning to do? Omit some of your achievements?