As a national merit semifinalist, please at least look at the award from University of Tulsa. It’s one of the best out there…a true full ride…including things like books. And you don’t have to be a NM finalist. This award is for NM semifinalist!
Here:
If you are NMF (I know you are awaiting on SF), the top schools will be, in addition to Tulsa whish @thumper1 noted is a full ride for NMSF…if you advance, you also have Alabama, UT Dallas, Maine, and more (some of the Florida schools) - so if you get NMSF (or NMF), you do remove that financial hurdle - which is a nice thing for a college student, especially from a family that will struggle to afford college.
Alabama has the most NMFs in the country (not proportionally but in raw #s).
The NMSF is still great - but not near as.
Yes, our SoCal daughter selected SUNY Buffalo after being admitted to a number of elite universities.
Why?
She thought she would do premed and SUNY Buffalo had a program whereby if she attended, maintained a 3.5 GPA, and met with health advisors, she would receive “priority” access to to med schools in upstate NY. ( I’m paraphrasing the program.)
She had to take a bioengineering course and decided that the engineering portion of that course struck well for her.
She ended up changing majors to electrical engineering and computer software engineering (double major-5 years).
At Berkeley, her best friend was in the EECS program. So being the competitive person that she is, our daughter double majored so that she could be competitive with her friend and took the “EECS”coursework at Buffalo. She was the only engineering tutor at the senior level.
She returned to SoCal and instantly went up the corporate ladder becoming a manager. She was asked to train junior level engineers. She’s been told that she’s an excellent leader and teacher of engineering and software concepts. The trainees always request to be on her teams or to transfer to a program that will work with her.
Her analogies of physics properties makes her a popular speaker during meetings. Very proud of her.
Is your Spanish something you want to continue?
In addition to the other perks of the NMSF full ride at Tulsa, you can also choose to pursue their International Engineering/Science & Language dual degree program, and the scholarship will fully-fund the fifth year as well. The fourth year is spent entirely abroad - one semester of classes and one semester of internship.
As an Asian female from the northeast you may want to consider the demographics of some of the NMF auto merit schools…
Fairly meaningful differences in regard to Asian populations withTulsa at 5.44% versus UA at 1.57%.
It is also notable that the NMF population size at Tulsa is 25% versus Bama at less than 3%.
Neither of these statistical differences should drive your decisions in isolation but worth your awareness.
Before you put too many eggs in the NMSF/NMF basket, you should check your selection index. If you scored a 1480 on the NMSQT PSAT, that may not be enough to qualify in a competitive state like NY. The selection index in NY is usually around 220. The good news is that with or without NMSF status, you’d be a competitive applicant at many great meets full financial need schools. Definitely pursue the possibility of Questbridge. Good luck to you!
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