$1500 is very nice. It covers her spending money for… a week?
I’m going to have D apply for a few scholarships that won’t interfere with her main scholarship. Only those that won’t require much effort and a few that I have inside contacts for.
Congrats to your S @jpc763 ! Great feeling, right?
@STEM2017 - It is! He has been accepted to his safety school, two free app schools and now one that he actually wants to go to! Each was a great feeling but this one is better because he is so excited. Now lets hope the merit $$$ comes in!
Congrats @jpc763 <:-P
It depends where S is accepted and which school he chooses/likes best as to if we will have him buckle down and apply for outside scholarships. He has some scholarship money from Boy Scouts and some from bridge club (yep, he actually earned a scholarship!) which will help for books. Two schools give Big MAC (tuition waivers) for NMF, and we can afford the housing costs. Like someone said earlier, many of the outside scholarships are small and one-time only, so they won’t make or break whether S can attend a particular college or not. And I don’t want him having to search for more funding every spring.
@STEM2017 Yep, you did coin the phrase. I remember when it happened. Wow, that seems like such a long time ago now.
@STEM2017 not in my world:)
@jpc763 Congratulations and good luck with scholarship! <:-P <:-P
Congrats @jpc763! Not easy getting accepted to engineering at UMinn. That’s awesome!
SOTD:
A. I have had D17 call because she needed to ask a question about scholarships & wasn’t sure how to word it without being super confusing.
B. D17 has emailed for some of the simple answers, but they’ve been pretty clear cut.
C. The only time I have called was to deal with financial issues - S15 got charged for meal plan twice in one semester. After him trying to take care of it via email & in person, I finally called & asked how he was supposed to eat 34 meals a week!
D. I check the emails & I have written emails from them, but I let D17 know what’s going on. Occasionally, S15 still will have me check something on email for him, but it’s getting less & less.
QOTD:
S15 applied for one because it was local & knew he had a good chance. He scored $2500 from that one! But at this point, chasing the merit from the schools for D17. We’ll see if we need to search for some additional once she gets through all those scholarship apps.
Vanderbilt and Tulane are the Southern Stalkers. UChicago is still relentless with emails and snail mail. Pitt, Wake Forest and Bates are the other schools with steady email campaigns. We are still getting snail mail daily to a bunch of schools we’ve never really heard of.
We have not looked at any outside scholarships, but maybe I’ll have son poke around. I know their guidance office keeps a big list. I’m just hoping he get’s some merit $$ at the school he decides to attend. However, in regards to 3 of his 8 apps, they are known to be stingy and he only has mediocre stats there ( so probably get nothing, zip, nada, zilch). The other 5 he has a chance to get at least something. The top 3 choices would cost $65-70K, the other schools maybe closer to $50 with some merit.
The news on outside scholarships sounds about as dim as I’d expected. The Courtney Thurston thread was informative and depressing. Especially
" A very small percentage of scholarship applicants win a very large percentage of the scholarships out there"
and
“The pool of merit-only outside scholarships is tiny (I can only think of Coke), and the pool that is merit based but doesn’t look at community service is basically 0.”
I’ve always been assuming that there will be $0 in outside merit in terms of looking at what we can afford. I’m going to look into a few, but without much optimism.
Those big national ones, you have to really stand out, be lower income and the deadlines are in the fall I think.
There is some money locally. One student at my D’s school applied to all major specific ones, and apparently not many other people did, or had higher income or lower stats, she ended up receiving several of them.
My D received around $2,000 and it definitely helped.
@snoozn, you could look into this:
SOTD: we haven’t needed to contact any. I think our answer would be B. I’ve signed S up for things using his email, but don’t have access to send email “from him.”
QOTD: He is working on one that is due tonight at midnight. It’s a local foundation, but they have a lot of money. Almost all of their scholarships are need based, and we would not qualify. They have a few that are merit only and primarily academic. There will be an interview phase also. I think these are around $2K and renewable for 4 years, so that would be nice. Most everything else we’ve found requires financial need or a whole lot of service hours in areas other than his service hours.
@NerdMom88 Wishing your D the least invasive and most successful surgery!
Few Vanderbilt stats from our school. Naviance shows the last admissions were in 2015. 9 applied, 2 admitted. Fewer applied since. It shows none of the 4 admitted chose to attend. Most of the applications were below their 25th %ile scores. The highest scores were the acceptances.
Holy smokes, D17 actually hit submit on her ED app last night, and got the 2 supplements off via slideroom this afternoon. #-o I was seriously starting to think that was never going to get done.
Thanks so much to all of you in this group for helping to keep me sane though my first go-round with this craziness known as modern college admissions. I’ll catch up with you all after I have my nice, large cocktail. 
@thermom Enjoy!
Does everyone think the stalking will let up some after today? It’s actually getting worse and some of the subject lines seem desperate. This is ridiculous. Clearly you aren’t going to make a student suddenly notice you today. Wake Forest has been threatening “this is your last chance” for a month now. PLEASE make it his last chance and re-engage the unsubscribe button!
Congratulations @jpc763! Did you visit the school? My D was accepted, too, but we weren’t able to visit. Any thoughts/descriptions you have would be so helpful. 
@paveyourpath --I do not think the stalking will relent until after the Jan 1st deadline. This is just the warm-up!
I am annoyed when a school does not include an ‘unsubscribe’ button anywhere on the email.