<p>I’m a Junior and I plan to attend UofA fall 2012, but I’ve been looking on the website at scholarships and the qualifications changed to something like the “top of the applicant pool”. I have about a 4.1 weighted GPA and about a 3.92 unweighted GPA. I took two AP classes this year because that’s all that was offered, and I plan to take three more next year. I’m involved in several different clubs at my school and I participate in color guard for my school’s band. In February I had a 26 on my ACT, but I plan to take it again this fall, and my score should go up some. What are the chances that I’ll get a large amount of scholarship money?</p>
<p>determinedj,
As a relatively recent graduate, I’m of course glad to hear you’re looking at the U of A. If you could answer a few questions for me (and the others that might read this), it might help us provide suggestions to make yourself more competitive for scholarships:</p>
<p>1- Are in an in-state or OOS student?
2- What are you looking at majoring in?
3- Have you taken the SAT, if so, do you have that score?
4- Are you a minority, first generation college student, or otherwise underrepresented in your intended field?</p>
<p>Thanks,
Matt</p>
<p>Oh I’m sorry!
- I’m in-state.
- Business (maybe Accounting focus)
- No
- I am an black female, first generation college student, and I come from a “low-income” background.</p>
<p>I have been looking at U of A for a few years now, but I know the only way I’ll be able to attend is through financial aid, so any advice or any comments about what I should do are welcomed!</p>
<p>Thank you!</p>
<p>Thanks, that does help! </p>
<p>Your first priority should be your ACT score. Try to get it as high as possible (of course) even if that means taking it another time beyond what you were planning. Due to application deadlines for scholarships, I’d take it twice in the fall close together if I were you and give it your best shot. Prep for it this summer if you can. A 26 isn’t a bad score, but you’ll want more than that if you’re trying to snag the “big money”, so to speak. </p>
<p>You need to apply for Academic Scholarships ([Office</a> of Academic Scholarships](<a href=“Academic Scholarship Office | University of Arkansas”>Academic Scholarship Office | University of Arkansas)) at the U of A by November 15th at latest. That is their priority deadline and you want to have everything in by then (make sure to have your test scores submitted directly to the UofA and they will update your scholarship profile as those come in). In your essay, find a way to mention that you are a first generation college student from a minority family. I’ve seen it brought into essays very well in the past, and it opens you up for consideration for a couple additional scholarships (like the Silas Hunt Scholarship, which is for any under-represented student, including minorities, first generation college students, and so on) that may help improve your odds of getting a larger scholarship. Make sure to put your best work into your essay and resume, they are critically important for the scholarship board. If your ACT score reaches a 32 or higher, apply for fellowships ([Fellowships</a> and Scholarships | Honors College | University of Arkansas](<a href=“http://honorscollege.uark.edu/93.php]Fellowships”>http://honorscollege.uark.edu/93.php)) and still mention these things in your essay. </p>
<p>Don’t forget about the state and federal programs and grants. You’d definitely get the lottery scholarship, but depending on your final ACT score, you may also be eligible for the Governor’s scholarship programs, which is a very nice scholarship to have. Apply for those here: <a href=“https://www.ark.org/adhe_financialaid/Login.aspx[/url]”>https://www.ark.org/adhe_financialaid/Login.aspx</a> . Of course you want to submit a FAFSA (it’s required by some of the state scholarships too, so talk to your parents about getting their taxes done early and submit that FAFSA ASAP so you get all the grant funds you might be eligible for), and depending on what grants are available, you might get something out of that too.</p>
<p>Most importantly- put your best work forward and be proud of your accomplishments so far. I was also a first generation college student and was from a very low income family, and with the academic scholarships I received from the U of A and the state (some programs that exist now weren’t available then, but I’m glad they exist now for you guys too!) I was able to get my bachelor’s degree absolutely debt free. I’ve told dozens of students in similar situations that I know it can be done. It isn’t easy of course, but if you work hard, apply to everything, and tell your story, things can turn out quite well.</p>
<p>-Matt</p>
<p>Thanks! I just got accepted into the LEDA program at Princeton this summer, so I won’t be able to take the ACT in June, but I’ll take it when I get back. Do you think this will help make me a little more marketable?</p>
<p>Of course! LEDA is a great opportunity and will certainly look good on a resume (and who knows, may give you an experience you feel you can write about in application essays).
Good luck with the ACT and your summer,
-Matt</p>
<p>I’m an incoming freshman and I know pretty much everything any incoming freshman should know.</p>
<p>Assuming your are in-state:</p>
<p>If you have a 32+ ACT, you are guaranteed to get $8,000. If your resume and essay are good, you might be offered a fellowship, which is $12,500.</p>
<p>If you have a 28+ ACT, you are guaranteed to get $4,000. You still have to do the early scholarship thing, but they don’t really care about your resume and essay unless you really screw up.</p>
<p>Also, they don’t care about your unweighted GPA and the number of AP classes you have taken. This school is number-driven and I really wish it wasn’t.</p>
<p>Just get that 28+ ACT, you will go to U of A for free. Good luck.</p>
<p>That’s what I was expecting to hear. I understand that they have a lot of qualified applicants. Thanks for the heads up! I’ll be at Princeton this summer for 7-weeks doing LEDA and I’m sure there’s some test prep and I’ll be doing online practice tests. I’m going for 28+!</p>
<p>webass,
That information is incorrect. As someone who used to help evaluate scholarship applications, I can assure you that there are unfortunately many more talented applicants with 28+ scores than the university has scholarship funds available for. Nothing is guaranteed, and the essay and resume are the critical factor when deciding which students get the awards. I admire your spirit and attempt to help other students out, but your information isn’t accurate (and hasn’t been accurate for several years) and I’d hate for students to read your post and have their hopes built up and then dashed by the reality of the situation. </p>
<p>Determinedj has a great story to tell, is working on continuing to improve their ACT, and is from a background that I feel the scholarship committee will find appealing, so I have high hopes for them, but they absolutely have to put forth a strong application if they expect to receive an award (simple numbers of applicants, average applicant GPA/ACT, and number of available awards prove that a certain ACT and certain GPA does not equal a certain award). I’m sure she’ll put forth a great application and get offers many places of course :), but as they say “don’t count your chickens before they are hatched”.
-Matt</p>
<p>Perhaps I should not post this as I cannot confirm or deny it. But, I know of a student who was not invited to interview for the Honors College fellowships who was told (hearsay, I realize) that they had 900 applicants for fellowships this past fall (Fall of 2010, wanting to enter as freshman at the U of A for Fall 2011) who had ACT scores of 34 and unweighted GPAs of 4.0. This student had a 34, but was just shy of the unweighted GPA that made the cut for interviewing. An IB student as well. He was able to piece together several scholarships to get the $$$ he needed, but he had truly assumed he would at least be invited to interview for the fellowship. So, while a 32 may be listed as what one needs to apply, it certainly wasn’t enough to receive. At least not from what I “heard.”</p>
<p>Hey! So I was searching through the Arkansas thread and stumbled upon this, and I figured I might be able to help out 
As a 2011 fellowship recipient, I can definitely confirm that you do NOT have to have a 34 ACT score to receive the scholarship. My ACT score was a 33, and I definitely know of people who have had 32’s and received the fellowship. I think the biggest component, is, as Matt said, your application and interview. Especially the application : ) Also, I believe the same is with GPA (though, I will say, most of the people I know have unweighted 4.0s if not very close).</p>
<p>As I wrote above, I wasn’t sure if I should have posted the info or not. It seems weird to me that this student did not get a chance to interview. He did have a 34 on his ACT, and very close to an unweighted 4.0 GPA. But he was not invited to interview. He has very few ECs b/c of the IB rigor. So, maybe he wasn’t well-rounded enough to be invited to interview??? or maybe he did interview but didn’t get it??? I really don’t know how it all works, so I probably should have not “said” anything. Especially since the info I had was second-hand.
Mea culpa.</p>
<p>Thanks! You guys are all helping me understand that nothing is guaranteed and all I can do is my best and see what happens! I see that a good, humble, and deserving personality is a VERY important characteristic that may be able to tip the balance and get me a better scholarship! (I’m hoping to get that ACT score up as much as possible!)</p>
<p>mmcnell,
I don’t know what you are talking about, but I still say a student is guaranteed to get at least $4,000 if the student is in-state, has a 28+ ACT, and 3.8 (I believe) GPA. I researched about this for two years.</p>
<p>webass,
I hate to sound like a broken record, but: Your information is incorrect. I was recently a staff member involved in this process (and represented the UofA on here as an admissions counselor for the past year answering questions in an official capacity), and know many current staff there right now. Not to be too blunt, but there isn’t any real debate to be had here, its’ simply not true that a student is guaranteed a certain award amount (any award, actually) just because they have a certain ACT and GPA. That information was pretty close to accurate back in the early to mid 2000s, but certainly is not now. I am glad you did your research and once again I admire your efforts to help, but whomever or where-ever you received that information from is a little outdated.</p>
<p>Simple analysis of the admissions and scholarships stats would prove that information wrong, if you want to look at it objectively for a moment. With an average admitted student ACT of 26, if you had access to the student data sets showing how many students are admitted with 28s or higher, and saw the number of scholarships of $4,000 or above offered each year vs. the scholarship application count, it’s pretty obvious that there aren’t as many scholarships as there are qualified students. Numbers are very important for determining how competitive a student is, but every student’s essay and resume is evaluated and scored as part of the scholarship decision process. These are critical factors in determining who will actually receive an award and at what level. Numbers can be viewed somewhat as “cut-offs” (it might take a 28 and a 3.8 to be considered for an Honors College Academy Scholarship on a given year due to the competitiveness of the applicant pool), but the rest certainly comes into play when the board sits down and decides who gets the money. There are far more qualified applicants than there used to be, and the award pool has not increased by the same magnitude (not even close, unfortunately), so the simple “if you’ve got X, you get Y” award system from when the university was smaller and there were fewer scholarship applicants compared to the pool of money hasn’t even been an option for several years. </p>
<p>It is of course your choice whether to believe me or not, but my information is accurate as of this year. As more time goes by I will be more out of the loop and have less current information (as some of your sources may have had), but scholarships aren’t going to get less competitive any time soon unless someone donates a substantial amount of money to the awards endowment.
-Matt</p>
<p>Here’s why I disagree with you.
</p>
<p>You can’t even imagine how many students with 28+ ACT and 3.8 GPA don’t apply for scholarships. I know many who didn’t apply for scholarships, and many who applied after November 15th deadline. You can’t just do correlation between students with 28+ applied/admitted and $4,000 scholarships offered.</p>
<p>If I had the data of scholarship applicants, I would have found that there’s a very high correlation between 28-32 ACT/3.8 GPA vs. the number of $4,000 scholarships offers. I say high correlation, not 100%, because some students really screw up their resumes/essays and/or are out-of-state (not neihboring states).</p>
<p>I really respect your input, but you’re coming from an another angel.</p>
<p>Thanks for explaining your view a bit, I can see where you are coming from a bit better now and why you may feel so confident of your position. However, it’s still conjecture vs. actual numbers. I can imagine how many don’t apply, because we used to look at exactly that information to determine how many scholarship applications we expected to evaluate on a given year. While it is true that not all 28+ admitted students apply for awards, or apply on time, the simple fact of the matter is several hundred of them (or more) will, and there aren’t near that many scholarships to give out. The angle I’m coming from is the one that saw the admission numbers and scholarship applications on a daily basis. It’s not second or third hand, I did this as part of my job :). When I helped to evaluate, for example, about 2500 people applied at the priority deadline for a few hundred total awards. Not all of them had 28+ of course, but many did and a great deal of applicants in that range base their decision on where they will actually attend, at least partially, by their scholarship award package so most of them do the work and get things in on time. So while your anecdotal evidence may be true for your group of acquaintances, obviously I don’t know that, I do know the actual numbers, and they don’t fit your ideas of how the process works or how competitive an applicant will actually be based of a 28 and 4.0 alone. </p>
<p>Your advice is risky because it inflates an applicant’s view of their competitiveness, and having worked in admissions, scholarships, and pre-med advising, I have seen far too many over-confident people end up hurt by views such as yours and I’m simply trying to prevent that.
Thanks,
Matt</p>
<p>You better have close to a 4.0 if you want anything from U of A. They care much more about GPA than they do ACT score. I feel bad for students who score high on the ACT (32+) and find out U of A will not reward them because their GPA is not 3.95.</p>
<p>Who told you GPA is weighted more than the ACT? No way! If a student has a 3.8, he/she is good to go. Please don’t post inaccurate information that you based on experiences of couple of your friends.</p>
<p>That information came straight from the scholarship office. They said the cutoff line for most scholarships last year was a 30 ACT and a GPA of just under 4.0. They told me they weight GPA higher than ACT score. They said their reason is that they find GPA to be a better predictor of student success that ACT score. That is what they said. </p>
<p>I can also tell you that I know several students who had ACT scores of 32 that did not receive any scholarship help from U of A. They had high GPA’s but not 4.0. I don’t know, maybe the messed up on their applications, but I do know their ACT and GPA numbers.</p>