Could someone please help me clear up this "First Choice School" issue?

STEMFamily
Sun, 01 Feb 2015 19:45:34 +0000

It sounds like you have a solid plan but the SDSMT website implies that the $3000 per year is an official NMSC scholarship, at least in part. Otherwise there would be no reason to involve NMSC regarding First Choice at all.

There certainly are strange and confusing things about this scholarship. First, it specifies a February 1st date for First Choice when NMSC doesn’t even start notifying colleges of Finalists who have listed them as First Choice until March 1st. Second, SDSMT does not show up in the NMSC annual report (at least for 2012-2013) as having any 2013 National Merit Scholars enrolled, let alone sponsoring any themselves. But the absence of SDSMT in the annual report could be because they don’t have any Finalists at all who enrolled that year.