Awards for Desperate Incoming Senior

MWolf
Mon, 05 Jun 2023 23:00:08 +0000

My kid’s only official award was National Merit Finalist, along with 15,000 other seniors. Oh, and a couple of high-school level ones. What got her the scholarship for which she was nominated was the stuff that she achieved, and it didn’t matter that there are no national awards for these achievements.

It’s true that a few very rejective colleges really only care about the official recognition a student gets (I’m looking at you, Harvard), but everybody else, including many many top colleges, care more about what you did than about the awards that you won.

What you need to work on is your portfolio. AOs for creative writing programs know that very very few students get awards in creative writing, and that these awards are extremely subjective (based purely on the preferences of the judges for that particular competition in that particular year).

You should also be trying to publish your writings, as well as submitting to every single literary competition out there.

angel737:

I want to be able to apply to very selective colleges, but don’t know how to further pad this section.

You don’t want to “pad” anything. Every AO will see right through it, and it will not help your application.

ALso, the best creative writing programs are not always in the colleges with the lowest acceptance rates. I like this list, because it’s by a literary journal. Others are generally by college consulting companies which have vested interests in students wanting to attend colleges with low acceptance rates.:

The Adroit Journal – 18 Apr 19

Thirteen Colleges Every High School Creative Writer Should Consider [Updated...

The process of selecting a college for four years—four significant years—of one’s life is never easy. What further complicates this process is the fact that more applications are flying into pretty much every school than ever before. What...

Acceptance rates to most of these colleges has dropped substantially, especially NYU, but you can see that there are many colleges that are excellent for creative writing that have acceptance rates above 20%.

The “even more college you should consider” are all also amazing colleges for students interested in creative writing.

Another consideration is cost. Creative writing is NOT a lucrative field, so you should be looking at th emost affordable colleges, not the colleges with the lowest acceptance rates.

Sweetgum:

Your GPA will matter more than creative writing awards

This should probably be repeated a few more times.