@KevinFromOC I hope this is involving your daughter…because she is the one heading to college in a year.
Re: University of Pittsburgh…if your daughter is interested in the college and you need merit aid…apply as soon as the application is available for submission. Do NOT wait until End of November. The key words in that info…funds may not be available after…since the school has rolling admissions and also does merit aid awarding early…get that application done NOW. The early bird catches the worm on that one. Otherwise…funds could be all used up.
Agree with @Mom2aphysicsgeek. Try to figure out what the scholarship committees are looking for.
An example from my experience: Ohio State’s 2 big scholarships are looking for two different things.
Here’s the link for OSU Eminence Fellows scholarship. https://honors-scholars.osu.edu/Pages/22.aspx. It will be a great resource for your D if she decides to apply, because it includes bios and goals of all the Eminence Fellows.
Here’s the link for Morrill Scholarship: https://odi.osu.edu/undergraduate/msp. They are looking for very different things than Eminence (see “Scholar Spotlight” at the bottom of the page).
After researching, my S discovered he was a good fit for Eminence but knew it would be a waste of time to apply to Morrill.
Another note, you don’t need to wait to submit the applications for NHRP notification. You can say “anticipated” if you want to but schools will see her scores and that she identifies part hispanic. (Students aren’t aware of NMF status in the winter after applications are submitted.)
You can also send updates via the guidance counselors with first quarter grades.
I really would not wait for places like Pitt.
I’ve been following this thread. Thanks to all who have responded. Certainly eye opening on the competition and the amazing students out there. OP: a few thoughts: C. S. Mines is on my kid’s radar; but it’s so so pricey. Neighbor kid is going there (35 ACT) and OOS tuition is a LOT even with their top scholarships; parents are taking out parent plus loans. I wish it wasn’t so; but with 4 kids we are just not comfortable with that for us. One school mentioned earlier I second offers good merit scholarships, chem engineering and NHRP scholarships is University of Nebraska Lincoln.
good luck with these decisions. I’ve been learning so much for my own kid as well.
Op… Head spinning yet. Love your comment if she scores Act higher by 4 points she would have a 40 Act… Lol. (you know 36 is the high limit… Right? ?).
Take the advice about not waiting for any rolling admissions. Get into that cycle now.
Also you don’t need to prove anything to anyone on here. Through our business since we charge a lot on our business credit cards we get at least 4 round trip tickets yearly. So going on trips litterly costs us almost nothing.
Your daughter sounds great. Love that she plays hockey. We made a similar spreadsheet, created like a Google doc so the kids could access the information easily.
It was easier to start crossing off schools for various reasons.
My only real advise is have safeties to your safeties that she would be happy to attend.
After that, take some chances and apply to school that make sense to you.
Also Colordo school of the Mines is great. My mechanics daughter just graduated from there and loved it and now has a great job in engineering. For anyone telling you no, someone else will tell you yes… Trust your gut… And wallet… Lol.
With all the information that’s been flowing, I don’t know whether you saw that Nebraska-Lincoln offers full tuition to NHRP scholars. Fees, room and board add up to $14K. The honors college offers a book scholarship to students admitted to the honors program. The web page makes it sound like the full tuition scholarship is guaranteed, but I would probably want to confirm if I were you.
I wished the data existed, but this can be another sign of the correlation I talked about 87 pages ago. It may be harder to get only 1 or 2 with a high number apps then multiple. Some students résumé’s just really click with scholarship committees and they are good interviewers, etc.
UCI and CSU Fullerton are about 15 minute drives from our house, the others are within 30 minutes (CPP - that’s where I graduated from many moons ago…)
I’m assuming UCI is as safe as it can get for admission, and to me is the best of all of those schools, thus I think it makes sense to only apply to UCI and not the others. If she isn’t admitted to UCI then we have much bigger problems going on…
I would suggest to not apply to so many schools, especially reaches (academic and financial). Even if she were accepted to some reaches, if you don’t qualify for enough need based aid to make it affordable, then the school should not be on the application list (run the net price calculator on their website).
Also at some schools that do give generous merit, unless the merit is automatic like at U Alabama or UAH, often honors college or competitive scholarships require extra applications and essays, maybe even visits that can be time consuming, and it’s important to put your best foot forward for these.
She can apply to Pitt pretty early, July or August I think, my D knew by September that she was accepted but merit notification was not until November/December.
But I believe they want more gender and ethnic diversity in engineering and do have some diversity scholarships, in addition to merit.
One of the nice things is that she is not locked into or kept from a particular engineering specialty, they all have the same first year engineering curriculum and are exposed to the different specialties and can decide after the first year.
You need a 3.0 GPA to keep the merit scholarship and Pitt also has a voluntary coop program.
As long as she has a few schools with automatic NMF merit and competitive merit based on stats, and she would be happy to attend, she will be fine.
Head’s spinning more than the Exorcist. Perhaps a nice bowl of split pea soup is in order…
And a 40 must be possible, since the e-mails I get guarantee a 4 point improvement! I bet they tell you about the extra credit questions on the back of the test that no one ever looks at…
With regard to post #144 you need to look at the whole picture rather than just whether full tuition is covered or not. For example at University of Alabama, engineering students get an automatic additional scholarship of $2,500 per year. Additionally the university has a strong co-op program which allows engineering students to earn money while they work and study alternate semesters. This money can be used to help cover tuition and living expenses. I don’t know if @LucieTheLakie is still active on this forum, but her son was a UA student who participated in the co-op program.
This kinds of opportunities will doubtless be available at other universities so it will pay to dig deeper than published cost of attendance. https://eng.ua.edu/admissions/scholarships/ https://coop.sa.ua.edu/
@KevinFromOC. At least you have a good sense of humor about all of this! ?.
There’s a saying that they will be fine where they land. Seems to be true most of the time.
Lots of great advice. Here’s what we did. Picked good 2 safeties and apply quickly. I would hope you could find 2 good UC/UCS/WUE schools with almost guaranteed admission that are affordable. Apply to that one reach/dream school with the knowledge that it’s highly unlikely but you never hit what you don’t swing at. Then find another 10 or so schools that meet her criteria, large, small, urban, rural, etc. AND offer large, guaranteed merit scholarships.
I mentioned WVU, USF, UCF, and Houston earlier. There are many others that could get you in that $15-20K range. Flyover country is your friend because the COL is lower. Managing more than 10-15 applications starts to become tough to balance with schoolwork, EC’s, and family time.
One more thing that parents don’t seem to remember is that room/board costs shift. If your kids are at home in high school you’re already paying room and board or at least a percentage. The tuition you’re paying now for boarding school gets to be applied to college next year. You see the yearly cost of college as new costs but you’re already paying some of that in room and board.
UCI may be more competitive than you think. For 2018, applicants in the highest GPA range (>= 4.20 on the UC recalculated weighted capped GPA) had a 75% admit rate to UCI. Your daughter presumably has stats in the high end of the range, but is applying for a more competitive major.
Things changed a lot for us as we started looking at schools (physically and online). I went in saying that my kids had to apply to at least 3 schools, including one instate public, no loans, they wanted small schools only… In the end they each applied to only one school (rolling admissions, so once accepted they stopped applying), neither applied to an instate public, one 3500 student school and one 10k student school, and small amount of loans for each. Oh well, best laid plans and all that. It worked out
“Then find another 10 or so schools that meet her criteria, large, small, urban, rural, etc. AND offer large, guaranteed merit scholarships.”
This doesn’t make sense. If the scholarships are guaranteed and the school is therefore a safety then why would would you apply to 10 such schools? Pick in advance which 2-3 you would consider attending. OTOH applying to 10 competitive scholarships is a different matter and a reasonable baseline.
Strong female STEM candidates with high standardized scores and achievements in math and science certainly have a bit of an edge in admissions. Hispanic female STEM is an even larger edge, so it’s worth emphasizing heritage and any ties to Mexican culture.
Not sure of anyone already pointed this out.
Your daughter since she goes to school in MA would be considered in the MA pool for NMSC Semifinalist and not CA. But bad news is MA is equally competitive as CA and last year’s cutoff was 223 as well. It was 222 year before that. So if MA cutoff by chance comes in at 222 you might still get NMSF even though it is a long shot. But there is a small chance.
Based on other stats if she makes NMF basically at Alabama you get full tuition+ board+ cash . Almost a full ride. They also pay tuition for 5 years that you can even do grad school for free.
I’m still happy to answer anybody’s questions if you want to PM me, but my son graduated in May (and landed a great job back home in Philadelphia, alongside lots of Drexel, UPenn, and Penn State grads, among others) and that combined with the changes to CC – VERY hard for these old, tired eyes to read here now – limits my time here.
Re Alabama and their scholarships, yes, it’s true the amounts are fixed now for the Presidential, but the Engineering Leadership Scholarship remains $2500/year and the co-ops, while not guaranteed, are well within reach of pretty much anyone who wants one (with the possible exception of aerospace majors). They generally pay very well. My son’s paid enough that it covered his cost of living expenses for 3 of the 5 years he was in Tuscaloosa. There are other, competitive scholarships available too, both in engineering and other areas. And, just like anywhere else, lots of kids work on or off campus, too.
Haven’t had a chance to read all the comments here, but I agree wholeheartedly with @Mom2aphysicsgeek’s thoughts a few pages back. Target your search for merit money to your child’s unique talents and appeal (to the target school). Alabama was my son’s “super safety,” but he had the time of his life there, graduated with zero debt and money in the bank, and got a great job back home in a VERY competitive market for engineers.
You know…you can apply to Alabama, and see what your daughter gets. IIRC, if she does get NMF status, you can update this for the additional award. @mom2collegekids is that correct?