@NorthernMom61 Thanks, I’ll definitely look into that.
Well I’m half way there as I just received a likely letter to my dream school! Also was named semifinalist for the CocaCola Scholar program. I have a list over 20 good outside merit scholarships and have applied to almost all of them. More than half of them can be renewed each year.
Good for you! Hope it works out for you.
I know it’s tough, but please understand that colleges are not responsible for what families wish to do with their money. If they have obligations, some are taken into account through CSS Profile. Overall I agree parents are primarily responsible for funding their kids within their means and should do what they can; I can’t imagine a better “investment” than in your own child’s education if you can afford to do so. I also understand that it’s difficult to be upper middle class and be full pay, and that many families have no choice. However, top colleges award financial aid for incomes representing about 95-96% of the American population. It’s not just the very poor and the very rich, but really, almost everyone who is within range for financial aid at those schools.
This being said, I keep my fingers crossed that you’ll get enough enough merit and outside scholarships to help you fund the college you want to attend. A good fit is very important and hopefully between your parents’ contribution, federal loans, working second semester&summer+ about 8-10 hours/week during the year, and any scholarship, you’ll be able to go. 
Please report here, as I’m sure many students will be interested.
@MYOS1634 Thank you for your kind words. I’ll make it happen.
just got invited to a scholarship weekend next month for an award that will be $10,000 per year. Fingers crossed.
Thank you for the update! I admire your drive.
Just received some great news. I was named a finalist for a corporate scholarship that will cover 5 years of tuition. Between that and the other 3 smaller merit awards I received I am down to only having to come up with about $4,000 plus the travel costs. I have next months scholarship weekend and also the Coca Cola in March. Then still applying for a few smaller scholarship for local programs. Now just waiting for the likely letter to become an admittance.
Would you mind giving the name of your corporate scholarship?
Yes I will share the name of the corporate scholarship after I am presented it, I have to fly out for the award ceremony. It’s not a widely known company so I’m sure it can help someone in the future.
Yaaah!, I was admitted to my dream school. Also, I was notified after my scholarship weekend that I didn’t receive the highest corporate scholarship but a smaller amount of which I am still very grateful. But I did receive a very unexpected outside engineering scholarship I found on my university’s website that awarded me $20,000 per year last week. I have been awarded 4 outside merit scholarships so far totaling $29,000 for first year, $23,000 of that is renewal each year. I was also just named a regional finalist for the Coke Scholars. I have applied to over 40 scholarships so far and 9 have notified me that I did not win. So am still waiting to hear back from about 30. I also have a list of others I am applying to that have not released their applications yet. The dream would be to get the Coke since my school cost is $54,000 a year and with the government loan I can take of $5500 would be doable. And if I get some of the other scholarships I won’t have to take a loan.
Coke scholarship decisions already came out.
@CourtneyThurston, could you please qualify your comment with additional (helpful) context?
“Coca-Cola Scholars on twitter Feb 22 (yesterday)
Notifications went out to our Regional Finalists last week - excited to share the names of our Coke Scholars on our website soon!”
@jr2016, congratulations on your acceptance and your finalist status, and good luck with your scholarship application process.
@CourtneyThurston I hope that’s not the case cause I’m a regional finalist and I haven’t heard anything either way. Would we be notified if we didn’t receive at the same time or are the rejections sent later?
The 2016 Coke scholars were all notified last week. Go look in the “Coca-Cola Scholarship” section of this forum – people posted on the same date about their acceptances.
Guess I didn’t win the Coke then, are you sure all notifications went out @CourtneyThurston Bummer if they did!
Pretty sure. Everyone I know who won was notified on the same date and at the same time as everyone here on CC. Historically the rejections have gone out later – and the Foundation publicly publishes the names a little later on.
Check your spam folder?
You could also call them maybe?
These are the 2016 Coke Scholars:
Angela Wang
David Xiang
Cooper Barghols
Amanda Flores
Michelle Howard
Rohini Nott
Jessica Peebles
Jorge Avelar-Lopez
Snigdha Banda
Dahkota Brown
Diana Chao
Ruoxi Chen
Ruwanthi Ekanayake
Jesus Franco
Durga Ganesh
George Hou
Joy Hsu
Anjini Karthik
Varun Mandi
Swetha Revanur
Maya Varma
Jade Wong
George Pandya
Harriet Pryor
Ashley Gong
Shangda Xu
Shrey Agarwal
Manzhen Chen
Maria Estrada
Talia Fradkin
Nicole Odzer
Dalton Price
Kriyana Reddy
Madison Thompson
Leah Winstanley
Catherine Chang
Amira Daugherty
Brandon Hardy
Raahina Malik
Grant Mercer
Alexa Anderson
Michael Chen
Mary Li
Sruthi Palaniappan
Winston Lie
Eamon Bracht
Tushar Dwivedi
Jerry Limon
Sally Nijim
Sabrina Vera
Sneha Dave
Scott Forsythe
Abigail Hancock
Vikas Maturi
Christina Randall
Shi Tuck
Gracie Schram
Xinlan Hu
Caleigh Propes
Amanda Tu
Kendall Yount
Beverly Brown
Stoney Mclarty
Nathan Chiu
Katie Curran
Angela Chin
Pranav Ganapathy
Eric Zhao
Francine Barchett
Jonathan Haynes
Alden Kane
Rosanna Wong
Rewan Abdelwahab
Neehar Banerjee
Meghana Bharadwaj
Denton Diggins
Noa Rose
Nicole Shah
Holly Holder
Jalen McGee
Megan Miller
Tejal Patwardhan
Shivraj Sandhu
Zachary Walker
Ian Saum
Elizabeth Yost
Kevin Stephen
Christopher Rathbun
Sonak Kolar
Sean Konz
David Li
Xerxes Libsch
Rose Reiken
Kameron Sedigh
Sunpreet Singh
Zainab Tahir
Julian Ubriaco
John Ball
Sahithee Batchu
Caleb Cole
Grace Ehemann
Allison Kao
Kavya Ravichandran
Sarah Senkfor
Christopher Coronado
Raghavendra Pai
Bhavin Gupta
Nadya Okamoto
Alexander Zhang
Grace Jin
Sophia Lee
Amy Li
Ashwin Reddy
Guanlin Ren
Siona Sharma
Michael Zhang
Cassandra Lin
Grace Miner
Krishna Gorrepati
Manaal Ali
Austin Lentsch
Allyson Monson
Sterling Fisher
Esther Brown
Saheel Chodavadia
Kimberly Collins
Sarita Damaraju
Azim Dharani
Javier Escobar
Grace Knight
Hannah Le
Paul Lie
Farhan Mohiuddin
Raymar Turangan
Nikit Venishetty
Karen Yang
Anthony Cheng
Michael Xiao
Lawrence Early
Quintin Lassiter
Wyatt Pontius
Reshini Premaratne
Matthew Sun
Mason Meyer
Emily Tan
Julia Todderud
William Jang
Jason Lin
Ananya Murali
Caroline Leadmon