<p>Congrats, Roxanne! You will love it at Tulane I am sure. Good luck with the Altman as well.</p>
<p>Dumb question (just curious) here…all the above posters received the Paul Tulane this week; has anyone received the DHS yet?..</p>
<p>Weird that nobody has posted…(unless it is posted elsewhere)</p>
<p>Posts # 12 and #23 are for the DHS, and I have heard there were others on the Facebook page for accepted students, which those of us that are not students or don’t have students applying cannot see. There are more posters for the PTA than for the DHS, which is a bit odd since there are 75 of the DHS and 50 of the PTA, but probably just an anomaly.</p>
<p>Received the package with the letter and a portfolio on Thursday. Given the DHS. DHS project was an Tulane app that you can download onto your android smartphone–if you are going to Tulane and have an android phone–go to the google market and look under Tulane–you will find the school’s app and the “applying to Tulane app”. There are very few people posting re the DHS on college confidential. I would be curious what others did for the DHS project.</p>
<p>My son also got his DHS package on Thursday. His project was a video he created where the screen is divided into 7 sections, each one showing him playing a different instrument, all synched together into one version of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” Stats were 34 ACT, 4.0 UW GPA, 4 on three AP tests (Eng Lang, US Hist, World Hist) and 5 on four tests (Calc BC, Bio, Chem, and Music Theory).</p>
<p>Congrats to your son, Mdndad! It seems like a lot of DHS winners are qualified enough for Ivies. If you don’t mind me prying a bit, is he going to accept the scholarship for sure or is he still considering other places if he were to get in, even without so generous a scholarship?</p>
<p>Roxanne -
He is still unsure. He will qualify for a significant amount of need-based aid, so we will just have to wait and see how it all plays out. But Tulane is awfully attractive right now.</p>
<p>I emailed Jeff Schiffman and he said that the non-winners will be notified by e-mail. I asked if he knew when, but I haven’t heard back from him yet. Just thought I’d share…</p>
<p>kelly99-
please post if he replies! i applied DHS and am still awaiting some sort of notification</p>
<p>Emails to non-winning applications for both the DHS and PTA will go out this week.</p>
<p>The email just came through at 9:30pm Eastern. :(</p>
<p>I got the email too :(</p>
<p>I did not win the Paul Tulane. I was hoping for the best, I have a 2280, top 3%, and I thought my essays were good. I guess there were just so few scholarships.</p>
<p>Yes, 50 scholarships and probably at least a few hundred, if not even a thousand or so, applicants that had stats similar to yours. It is like the head of admissions at Harvard once said (going back to the comparison that applicants for the PTA and DHS generally have Ivy caliber stats, like yours). The entering class at Harvard is about 2000 students out of about 30,000 applicants, or something like that. He said that the caliber of applicants was so high that they could replace the 2,000 that were coming with the next 2,000 that did not get in and see no drop off in quality. It is just that tough sometimes. I am willing to bet that they could take the 50 runners-up in the PTA selections and a similar statement would apply.</p>
<p>Best of luck to you and the others that made a great effort.</p>
<p>How much weight do y’all reckon was placed on the essays for PT? It seems like the people that won all had high stats, but lots of people who didn’t have equal or higher stats. Might they have targeted certain demographics with the scholarships, the way colleges in general tend to do for admissions?</p>
<p>These merit scholarships certainly target strong students with high stats, but if they didn’t take the essay into consideration, I’d think they wouldn’t bother to ask for anyone to write them!</p>
<p>I am not sure I understand your reasoning, cruxclair. Let’s put it this way. Out of the 50 PTA scholarships available, there were probably a few hundred, if not many hundreds of applicants that had stats that were roughly equal and quite high. It is a merit scholarship, so you would expect GPA, strength of schedule, and test scores to be highly significant considerations. Then to choose from that pool of students, the essays would be the deciding factors for the most part. Just like the box project would be for the DHS.</p>
<p>So if you are asking can really great essays make up for a high school record that is substantially less than the hundreds of applicants at the top end, I think the answer is no. Can it put someone on the edge of those statistical levels into a winning position? I think the answer to that is yes, because great box projects have done that with some DHS applicants in the past. But someone with a 3.2 GPA and a 29 ACT is not going to win one of these awards no matter how good the essays, IMO.</p>
<p>I won’t sit here and categorically say that among those equally meritorious students they didn’t use other factors such as demographics to make some decisions. I won’t say they did either. My own feeling is that Tulane has always taken these scholarships and the sense of the competition being based strictly on merit very seriously, but at the same time I can see making an argument that using them to attract students they feel they need to have more represented at Tulane is perfectly valid, as long as those students are equally qualified on the merits. In other words, as a tie breaker. Once you have a greater number of qualified students than there are awards, something has to be a deciding factor(s). But it is all speculation as to whether that is done or not, the only thing I know for sure is that the winners are the best of the best in terms of their record to date. Many of the non-winners are as well, but as we have said, only 50 can win.</p>
<p>Exactly you last sentence was the reason I was asking these questions - I’m curious as to what went into the selection process, when they knew they could accept such a small percentage of people who entered. It seems a bit like an extension of the college admissions process itself in that you have a large volume of people who are qualified, and a smaller number of that group especially stand out (perhaps in this case with good essays, or in the case of DHS with good projects), but this smaller group is still larger than the number of awards. So a decision has to be made somehow. I’m not trying to condemn their decision-making methods or anything, and I’m very grateful to be a PT recipient. I’m just think it would be interesting to know some of the details of the decision because it seems like some of the people who didn’t win had higher stats than I did, at least in some areas (GPA and rank, mostly), and that makes me feel…I dunno, guilty? about winning.</p>
<p>Oh goodness! You certainly shouldn’t feel guilty! I think you are very correct that it is a lot like the admissions process in terms of the reasoning involved, at least up to a point. My intuition is that the “diversity” aspect would be much less of a factor, especially since one is dealing with much smaller numbers and so the impact on the diversity of the student body is fairly limited. The main goal has to be to entice the most academically achieving students to come to Tulane.</p>
<p>Stats are not absolute in the sense that within a certain tier, students are not going to be considered very different. Going back to the Harvard and Ivies analogy, they have said on various occasions that a student that gets 2200 on the SAT is really no different in their eyes than one that gets 2350. The point isn’t those exact numbers, but that once you are considered to be in the top tier academically, the other differentiating factors will kick in. In this case the essays, recommendations (in the case of the DHS, I guess the Paul Tulane had no additional recs, correct?), etc. Maybe certain diversity or background factors played a role, I really don’t know. But if they did, as I said I suspect they were a hair’s breadth type of tie-breaker. I don’t think they will ever say exactly what the details are, and to the extent that judging essays and projects is subjective, I am not sure how they could beyond what we pretty much already know.</p>
<p>The main point is that with a 36 ACT (that goes a long way!) and a 4.6 W GPA (3.8+ UW, which shows you took a very challenging course load), you are clearly in the top tier of achievers. The scholarships you have won to other fine schools shows that Tulane is not alone in their high opinion of you. Not that I want to give you a big head, lol. But neither should you be negating the quality of your work to date. It stands up against anyone. You certainly must have deserved the award, and Tulane will be very lucky to have you.</p>
<p>You said before that it looks like you are going to Tulane. Was that comment just for emphasis that you were excited about winning or are you really decided that Tulane is the place for you?</p>
<p>Has anyone not gotten the email yet even though they didn’t get the UPS?</p>