| not entirely, not in the sense that you have to know exactly what you want to do and how you want to do it, because nobody has that coming in to college and if they do it will probably change. When I say focused I am still hinting at a similar idea though. Someone who has a pretty good idea of what they want to go into, but more that they have made steps in that regard, and shown an ability and passion for something academically.
We here so much about people having 'passions' and that thats what it takes to get you into good schools, well I guess thats partially true, but you need to be passionate about something academically too. If you have straight A's just because you think you have to, and you work your butt off but couldn't really care less about what your studying then your probably not going to get echols. Do you see what I mean?
I'll give you the only example I know of. In my case, I am passionate about research and physics, and I guess i demonstrated that through my internships at NASA, my internship at JLab, and self studying physics topics outside the cirriculm. I'm sure it also helps to have reccommendations that show this passion as well, though I only sent in one. I have good friend that has almost perfect grades, strong SAT scores, and probably reccommendations that say he is "smart", but thats not what it takes (he didn't get Echols btw). The Scholars programs are not a numbers game, the numbers get you consideration, but then cuts are made by the other factors, passion and focus academicaly is a big one of those. Does that make sense? |