<p>thanx NYSP2010!
btw, did u have like a lot of awards, honors, and leadership skills?</p>
<p>Thanks NYSP2010</p>
<p>I had a similar question when you applied what were your grades, leadership, awards, activities, community service like?</p>
<p>I just wanna know if I have a chance.
I’m an African American male
4.38 weighted GPA
Number 12 out of 520 students
I have one state award three city awards, and numerous academic awards that I won at school
8 clubs hold an office in 5 of them including vp of NHS
More then 200 hours of community service
Volunteer at my local court house on Wednesday as a youth attorney. Do I seem like a good candidate? I keep feeling like I’m not good enough.</p>
<p>I have read many threads dating back to 2005 where many GM Scholars have only posted 150 word “essay” and won the award. To me, it seems the people are chosen by the quality of their essay, not the quantity.My essays range from 1500-4000 characters :p</p>
<p>borkborkbork: not as long as yoiu stay above 3.0</p>
<p>jsungoh: Ap courses are considered a special type of honors course; simply write “AP” before the class and check the honors box</p>
<p>aziangirl: just try presenting your ideas, forget about paragraph count. Quality beats quantity.</p>
<p>JSea11: You make a strong competitor…</p>
<p>Thanks LocoArts and NYSP2010.</p>
<p>I’m really having trouble with the honors section. I can only think of three honors (I had to dig really deep). My school barely participates in any competitions except Intel and debate competitions. Well, I didn’t join debate, I know I’m not winning Intel, and I don’t know the status of my ISEF app. Most others aren’t competitive scholarships.</p>
<p>I’ll be happy with a 3.0 this semester, but usually my GPA was way higher.</p>
<p>My friend who went to some camp had some insider advice (?). He said it has to be at least 4 pages for them to even look at this. Idk how this is possible…but still freaking me out a little.</p>
<p>I’d say all of the essays are pretty straight-forward but for some reason I just can’t seem to formulate two of them.</p>
<p>One would be what’s your best subject. I need to think of exciting topics.</p>
<p>The other one was the disadvantaged situation one…I have no idea!!!</p>
<p>How about you guys?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>LOL, your friend is grossly incorrect.</p>
<p>4 pages of what? Essays? I still need to do four more essays by Sunday :eek:</p>
<p>Would it kill me if I get like a 3.0 avg GPA for my first semester of senior year? I’ll improve my second semester but this one is just killing me.</p>
<p>All the essays frustrated me at one point honestly. But once I figured out what I wanted to write about it got easier.</p>
<p>I have a question about this question:
Discuss your involvement in and contributions to a community near your home, school or elsewhere. Please select an experience different from the one you discussed in the previous question, even if this experience also involved leadership. What did you accomplish? How did this experience influence your goals?</p>
<p>So it says discuss contributions, with an S. but then it says select an experience. I wrote about multiple things in this essay. Is that bad? Or should I stick with one thing?</p>
<p>I agree, the “four page” thing is just ridiculous. You can’t fit 7800 characters max into four pages unless you hugely changed the font or something. The longest of my essays was a little more than two pages if I recall correctly? And I don’t know what camp would have insider advice, unless that person was oddly referring to the conference that all the freshman scholars go to.</p>
<p>Gates isn’t GPA-crazy, so as long as you keep a decent GPA throughout senior year they’re not going to care. 3.0 is fine as long as none of those were F’s or something horrible like that.</p>
<p>JSea11, you honestly sound like you have good chances from what you have told me. You are in more clubs than I was (although, I don’t know if Gates would rather see deep involvement in a few clubs rather than spreading yourself thin on so many. But either way, you seem to have a lot of leadership and community service)</p>
<p>For those asking me, I guess I can write a little about myself.
4.68 GPA (At graduation; I can’t remember what it was at time of applying)/3.99 or 3.98 Unweighted (Again, can’t remember; just, all A’s except one lousy B in AP Bio my senior year lol). But Gates asks for unweighted GPA anyway sooo I’d think more about that…although Gates isn’t very GPA-based anyway, it’s more community service/leadership.
Ranked ~8 of 780 at time of application
Usual academic awards (honors roll, principal’s list), Outstanding Service Award for Interact Club, School’s Award for academic achievement (don’t want to say specific name because then you might be able to figure out where I went to HS), Community Service Award
Had about 200 hours of community service listed on application I believe
Involved in local Chinese Catholic Community (Altar Served, volunteered at church events, involved in the Youth Group, bible study/led a few bible studies as well, attended monthly business meetings for the church), Japanese Culture Club (VP for jr/sr years), Interact Club (District Student Council Member jr year, Club Treasurer sr year), Rotary Youth Leadership Awards (RYLA) Camp summer before my senior year/basically an awesome leadership camp…I don’t remember if I put random stuff like Engineering Club (Historian) and Students for Wildlife Conservation</p>
<p>Honestly I think the essays were the most important part, along with the nomination&recommendation…because those are what really show your character and make you stand out to win the scholarship.</p>
<p>hopeful201, I think it’s fine to talk about various ones if you tie it to one greater theme of something you learned/one aspect in which you grew. For example, in my essay I wrote about multiple experiences volunteering for one cause…so it should be okay. Just don’t get too broad with too many experiences like a laundry list; make it show meaning in each experience.</p>
<p>Thispakistanigir…think back, there must have been some point in life where you were disadvantaged, be it in school or in your community or anything like that.</p>
<p>Thanks again.</p>
<p>Wait, on the application, they want you to indicate your GPA, but you don’t have your senior year grades. And then if one is selected as a finalist, they have to send in their transcript, but it will have a different GPA indicated (after first-semester classes).</p>
<p>So how should you write in your GPA?</p>
<p>borkborkbork: You just need to request the most updated transcript at this point; meaning that your curent GPA goes on the application. If you are selected for second round, you only have to worry about keeping your GPA above 3.0</p>
<p>Thispakistanigir: You don’t actually need to look for stuff about yourself. I wrote about my friend and how i helped her throughout her pregnancy when the teachers would not. This essay is a “kill” essay. A perfect essayist could easily win through this essay. Here you are given the chance to show the level of leadership and humanity within you. It is an important essay because it also showcases your problem solving skills–how you address a situation is more important than the fact that you addressed it. I’m sure you can find something. Good Luck!!! :)</p>
<p>PhuongABong: Let’s think about it this way:</p>
<p>If the website offers you the option to mail rather than submit on-line, It holds true that both; the online form and the class-mail form will be reviewed as equals.</p>
<p>Therefore, the amount of work is expected to be equal.</p>
<p>The class-mail form offers you only one page and asks you to confine ideas to that one page( meaning the dont expect you to write the whole page)</p>
<p>That being said, the 7800 character mark is mostlikely there to encourage you to express yourself but not too much. You would have to write 6 pages single spaced to match the character limit number(barely anybody is willing to write this much)</p>
<p>4 pages is unheard of…But if you manage to write a high quality essay that spans 4 or more pages, it will definetly give you some points.</p>
<p>im sry if i ask too much questions lol but do u guys have any advice on the question about short and long term goals? and what do they mean by are they related??
thanx alot!!! :)</p>
<p>I’ve written an essay that was like 7760 chars and it took only a little more than 2 pages single-spaced…</p>
<p>aziangirl:questions are good.lol… but yea, this question is not so hard…
Basically, they are asking you what do you want to do in the future and why should they invest their money in you. A safe way to approach this question is to list the reasons you want to go to college(as short-term goals) and then write about what you will do with college resources to earn your place in the world(long-term) the co-relation should be included in the transition.</p>
<p>This was me:</p>
<p>Short-term- attend a college for optical engineerin( I wrote how i was prepparing[AP Classes,Books,Experiments], and where i would plan to study[and why])</p>
<p>Long-term- to design a new medium of communication through three-dimensional holographic systems(I wrote why i thought it would be important and how I could “fix” some of the world’s problems through this)</p>
<p>Try to build off of this format, and Good Luck!!! Deadline is almost coming 0~0</p>