<p>For those select few who made it to WASHU for the finalist weekend, How was it? What were your experiences? Good Luck to all.</p>
<p>(note: I was an Ervin finalist, and I don’t know too much about what the other scholarship finalists did)</p>
<p>It was a lot of fun! The interview is a very, very small part of it. Mine was probably only 15-20 minutes (though I think most were about half an hour). We had a lot of free time to attend classes, go to the loop, explore campus, go to the art museum, hang out in the DUC, etc. We got to be very independent.</p>
<p>One thing I will say is that the food was amazing. I was expecting those pre-packaged sandwich-cookie-fruit lunches every day, but (though we had that once) mostly we had huge buffet-style meals with lots of hot food. Every breakfast had pancakes, bacon, sausage, eggs, etc. I was pleasantly surprised :P</p>
<p>The group activities were very geared toward selling Wash U to the RD students. We saw a variety show, a film festival, bowling/karaoke, etc. I think it made several students choose Wash U as their first choice who weren’t previously considering it as strongly. We also had a lot of activities/dinners with the current scholars to get to know them and ask questions about the program.</p>
<p>It was a great weekend, but I’m pretty sure every single one of us was absolutely exhausted by the end. There wasn’t much time leftover for sleeping. Also, if you’re upset that you didn’t get to go, I wouldn’t worry about it too much because I’m sure that multicultural celebration weekend, pre-orientations, orientation, and the first forty will be just as much fun.</p>
<p>Awesome!!!</p>
<p>It was fabulous - I agree with basically everything that AsianGinger said. </p>
<p>I was an Honorary Scholars finalist so we had a few “special appointments,” which were one-on-one conversations with professors in our areas of interest, and other special tours depending on the scholarship within the Honorary Scholars, so my schedule was a little different from hers. But I still had time to walk around campus and the loop and do a lot of other things. Still, they kept us busy! I got a reasonable amount of sleep though (6-8 hours depending on the night), while seeing all the things I was interested in.</p>
<p>The food was in fact amazing, and they gave us $15 on a card to use for the meals that weren’t covered (there were only one or two of those) as well. They’ve got a lot of variety on campus - Bears’ Den, for example, has wonderful pastries and sweets. 
The meals they gave us were delicious, and the formal dinner on Friday night was one of my favorites (three course meal with your interviewers - who are professors on campus). You have opportunities to get to know your interviewers before the actual interview (I had two 30 min ones), and they had such interesting stories to tell.</p>
<p>One of the most striking things about WashU is the friendly atmosphere - it’s easy to say that a place has friendly people, but at WashU, it was noticeably so. The faculty and administration are all wonderfully kind, but you can tell that the student body really cares and wants to be there as well. It’s just a really warm and welcoming environment, and the students who go there really enjoy talking to “prefrosh.” :)</p>
<p>All in all, I had a wonderful weekend (as I’m sure many others did) and I’m so glad I had this opportunity!</p>