<p>Goodness, that isn’t so far off!</p>
<p>SFS 2015 (from NM press release):
Campoamor, Sofia I.
Davies, Riley D.
Jarymiszyn, Kiley M.
Kenney, Cornelius F.
Rivkin, Alexander M.
Stark, Gigi F.</p>
<p>Hoping I make finalist here. I have a 2030 SAT, so pretty sure I’ll make the cutoff. I asked NMSC a couple weeks back and they said it was 1960. I hate this wait…</p>
<p>Thanks for generating your predictions chart. gmt.</p>
Well, is it time to rev up the stress level as we await Finalist notification? I see that @STEMFamily says the letters go out in February. Too bad the principal gets his letter a week early. He won’t bother notifying the students.
I read on the NM website that the letters go out in January. Do you think that is for students who do not make Finalist? If so, I will be super tense checking the mailbox until we know the outcome!
My bad- the letters that go out in January are for National Achievement. The National Merit Finalist letters do go out in Feb, as @STEMFamily said. So do the students who do NOT make Finalist get notified ever?
@barfly They do send letters to NMSF that do not make Finalist. The first CC post of a student receiving such a letter last year was January 14th, and the year before that it was January 12th.
Oooh, that’s like next week!
Well, we will certainly hope NOT to receive that letter!
Oh gosh. We are in the same boat. No news is good news…For a few weeks at least.
X_X
Yep, I am sitting here hoping I hear nothing until February. I don’t see any reason I wouldn’t make it; my NMSC SAT score is 2050, I don’t have any Cs, I got my application in on time, I didn’t write a rude essay and I’m not in trouble, so I think I’ll make it. Just want to have that letter in hand so bad!
Could someone explain the whole college-sponsored awards thing to me? I know there are the large scholarships some colleges give (like full-ride or full-tuition) to NMF, but the college sponsored awards seem different, like a few thousand dollars at one time or over a few years. I know I won’t get a corporate scholarship because my parents don’t work at sponsor companies and I doubt I will get the one-time NMSC $2500 award since my scores are on the low side of things, but I’m trying to understand the college-sponsored awards. My top choice college is listed in the NMSC guide as sponsoring 3 scholarships - they also give automatic full rides to NMF that are accepted there and designate them as my first choice by a certain date. So are they different? And could I get a college sponsored scholarship from a college I’m not going to? Thanks for any replies to my questions!
You would get a ‘college-sponsored’ scholarship only if you actually go to that college. It would show up in
your financial aid awards as probably 1000 per year. From reading posts here and their website, it sounds
like you cannot get both - the $2500 NMSC award and a college-sponsored one. I am also guessing
that unless it says ‘automatic’, each college decides how many it gives out.
@jbourne
So although the college already gives full rides for NMFs, I could potentially get a little more money as a college sponsored scholarship? I know the full ride is guaranteed to any NMF that gets admitted and names the school as the top choice, so I think the college must give 3 “college sponsored” awards.
@albert69, the colleges with the full-rides separate out some part of that money- $500-$2,000/yr and make that their official college-sponsored award with the NMSC. The students who come in with NMSC $2500 or corporate awards get that money instead of the college’s sponsor money. You can only have one official sponsored award. In some cases, if the NMSC award is less than the amount of the college’s sponsored part of award, the college may give the student the difference so that he doesn’t lose money by having NMSC for a sponsor.
Example. The college gives $1,000/yr as sponsored part of award but student comes in with NMSC one-time $2500. The college either gives the student an additional $500/yr in yrs 2-4, to equal $4,000. Or the college gives student $1,000 in yrs 2-4 so the student comes out $1,500 ahead. In either case NMSC is the official sponsor.
So in the NMSC guide, the number to the left of college is the total number of National Merit Scholars, that is, number of students who are sponsored by some entity. The number in parentheses to the right is the number officially sponsored by the college. The rest are corporate or NMSC sponsored.
So the answer is no, you don’t get any extra money from the college if you don’t have the NMSC award. But in your finances tab at the college, that $1,000 official sponsored money will appear as a separate line item and needs to be renewed through NMSC each year, even though the college is the one supplying the money. NMSC will send you a reminder. Depending on your college, you might come out a bit ahead if you got the NMSC $2500.
Thanks for the input, @jbourne and @celesteroberts. We’ll see… I don’t care that much if I actually become a NMS, NMF is good enough for me, though of course it would be cool if I did get something from NMSC. The college I am planning to go to doesn’t enroll many NMFs (I think last year they had about 15) so maybe I have a chance at the “officially” sponsored scholarships (as well as the - unofficial, I guess? - automatic full-ride scholarship). I guess no one knows how they pick the NMS. My sister got the $2500 award, but she had a very high PSAT score and a perfect SAT, so that was probably a factor.
@albert69, I think I didn’t explain very well. At a full-ride school, the official sponsored scholarship is already embedded in the full-ride. It is part of the full ride. You will be a National Merit Scholar if you attend a full ride school, whether or not you get the NMSC money, because you will get the official sponsored money from the college as a part of the full ride.
Say your school gives NMFs tuition/rm/bd money that totals $46,000 freshman year. In your finances it will appear as $23,000 each semester and that money will be broken down into $22,500 ‘Named school NMF scholarship’ and $500 ‘College sponsored NMF scholarship’ each semester, or something like that. You DO get the sponsored money, but it isn’t EXTRA money on top of the full ride.
I have a D at a NMF full tuition school and this is how it works, except that at her school the sponsored part is $250/semester.
There are exceptions here and there. At our flagship, UW-Madison, a donor fund gives all entering in-state NMFs $7,500 one time freshman year scholarship. This money is not linked in any way to NMSC, although the scholarship is exclusively for NMFs. No money is split off as I described above and the recipients do not appear in the list of National Merit Scholars for the school in the NMSC report.
Separately the school does offer a small officially sponsored scholarship called the National Merit Scholarship to at most 5 of the NMFs who enroll. These do appear in the NMSC report. The in-state students who get this 2nd scholarship receive both scholarships.
But I think this is unusual
@celesteroberts, thank you for posting the information about the NMSC $2,500 scholarship. When my S & I read through the NMSC Instructions for Semifinalists, we had written question marks all around that subject!
A follow-up question:
The NMSC guide shows that our state school sponsors 3 NMFs (number in parentheses to the right of the school).
Let’s say the school gives a $21,000 annual scholarship to in-state NMFs to cover tuition, room, board, books, fees, etc., plus a $2,000 per year college-sponsored Merit Scholarship – for a total scholarship of $23,000/year.
Now let’s say that 10 in-state NMFs apply to this school and list it as their first-choice school before March 1st.
According to the Instructions for Semifinalists, NMSC mails offers of National Merit $2,500 scholarships on March 26th and begins mailing offers of college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards on May 1st.
Now can I assume….
-
That 3 of the NMFs that applied would receive an offer for the college-sponsored Merit Scholarship of $2,000 per year (and that these 3 would NOT receive an offer for the National Merit $2,500 scholarship, nor an offer for a corporate-sponsored scholarship).
-
And, that the other 7 NMFs that applied would NOT receive an offer for the $2,000 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship, but MIGHT receive an offer for the National Merit one-time $2,500 scholarship or a corporate-sponsored scholarship if they meet the criteria for one of these.
And then, if all 10 NMFs actually attended the school…
- 3 of them would get the full $23,000/year scholarship from the school.
- 7 of them would get a $21,000/year scholarship from the school, plus the additional National Merit one-time $2,500 scholarship or a corporate-sponsored scholarship – IF they were awarded one of these.
Sorry to be so long winded, but I wanted to fully explain the question. I’d appreciate if you could either confirm or correct my assumptions. I didn’t realize that the “full-ride” schools embedded the college-sponsored scholarship into their scholarship packages until I read your post.
I really appreciate the tips and advice from everyone in these forums – extremely helpful!!!
@LMHS73, @celesteroberts
I think I’m beginning to make sense of it. So, the “college sponsored” scholarships are paid for by NMSC, and if I got one, it would come to me as part of the package I will get as a NMF at the college (tuition, room, board, & a $1000 stipend.) If I don’t get one, I would still get that scholarship since it is an automatic scholarship, just it would be paid completely by the college and I would not be a NMS, just a NMF.
(I am ignoring corporate scholarships and the one-time $2500 award for the purpose of this discussion. I am not able to get any corporate scholarships and the $2500 is pretty simple; you either get it or you don’t.)