<p>some advice from Silicon Valley: you should bulk up the emotional/leadership part of your application. There’s no shortage of people with your smarts, scores and coding abilities; what distinguishes scholarship winners is extracurricular activities that show hard evidence of </p>
<p>a) leadership potential
b) emotional depth/concern for those less fortunate
c) “well-roundedness” and “social intelligence”</p>
<p>A suggestion: contribute your talents to the “Hacking Autism” project. Background: the ex-CTO of Hewlett Packard, Phil McKinney, has an autistic grandson and has been leading an initiative to get programmers to build apps that can help autistic kids function better. From Phil’s blog:</p>
<p>[Phil</a> McKinney Join me in hacking autism](<a href=“http://philmckinney.com/archives/2011/05/hacking-autism.html]Phil”>http://philmckinney.com/archives/2011/05/hacking-autism.html)</p>
<p>I’m sure your skill in both programming and instructing others could be useful to this project. You could help a lot of people, do something really innovative and cool, and help yourself in the process.</p>
<p>Good luck!
-t</p>