The Huffington Post published an inspiring story about Viviana Andazola Marquez, a teen who overcame huge obstacles, including being homeless, to get into Yale with all costs covered by scholarships. (She’s a sophomore now.)
For me, a high point of the article was this comment:
'Andazola Marquez’s high school – actually her entire school district – had never sent a single student to an Ivy before. “Anything I found out about, I found out about on my own,” she said. Andazola Marquez obsessively researched schools like Yale, Harvard and Princeton and brought all of the information to her guidance counselor.
She used the website College Confidential to apply to summer programs for high school students and to read forums about acceptance criteria for the schools she was interested in.’
While few students had to face all the difficulties Andazola Marquez did, this part of her story is no doubt shared by many.
I love that CC is part of Andazola Marquez’s story, and I know we’ve helped many thousands of other students get into their dream schools, whether those dream schools are Ivies or something else entirely.
Playing even a small role in these success stories is exactly what motivated us to set up CC as a free resource, open to everyone regardless of where they go to school or their financial situation. Congrats to Viviana and the many others we don’t know by name!
Very, very cool! I remember Kelsmom several years ago helping a student navigate a situation and I’m sure if I think hard enough I could remember other stories of posters who have been magnificent in their aid and I love when students come back after graduation and tell everyone their outcome and you remember when they were posting, searching, etc.
CC is definitely the best college & scholarship infor website. It has helped my D tremendously and the people on here are very smart, knowledgeable helpful…and most are nice and kind.
Wish i could be as nice as LannaHere. CC is not a 23 year old. CC is not a assistant admin officer who merely restates the website contents after I burned up two vacation days. Thank you all for your contributions. You’ve saved me air fare and leave without pay!
My daughter sat next to her at an accepted student luncheon put on by the local Harvard club. She made it clear that she intended to go to Yale and was only there was because her parents insisted. It was great to see her essay in the NYT, and again to read this article - I hope she serves as an inspiration for many talented kids coming from similar backgrounds.
I think the mention, and the resource, of CC was wonderful. Kind of like the stranger at the bus stop who says something more insightful and affirming to you than many others in your life. The human connection. Yay!
Nice to see this young girl take advantage of resources available to her. I am glad so many kids discuss the summer r programs on CC to have given her the information to make use of her summers.
I have a lot of comments based on reading the article, but my #1 not so nice comment is to the OP:
PLEASE sir do NOT use the term “scholarship” when a person gets a full ride offer due to poverty. The word scholarship means:
“a grant or payment made to support a student’s education, awarded on the basis of academic or other achievement.”
She was offered no scholarship from an Ivy League school. She was offered full financial aid in the form of grants, due to poverty. Perhaps she got other scholarships, but the full ride from Yale was not a scholarship.
Do not mislead future applicants into thinking that something they have control over, like their grades or test scores or volunteer work or whatever, can lead to a full ride. The girl was homeless and very very poor. She got a “full ride” as every other accepted student gets when their family income is less than a certain amount (used to be 60K per year).
Actually, one article said she applied for many scholarships (presumably from third party organizations) and was awarded a phenomenal $1-2 million in total. That article didn’t say how many of those were need-based, if any.
I am sure she was awarded need-based grant money from the university. The outside scholarships might help defray costs of attendance that aren’t included in the school money. (I don’t know if Yale reduces grants when a student earns outside scholarships.)
The lesson isn’t that anyone can get a free ride at an Ivy by hard work. Need is the qualifier for grants.
My takeaway from the story is that a young woman who might have been written off as “not college material” or steered toward a local community college was able (through amazing effort on her part) to get into and attend one of the nations most selective universities.
Ya know, I met an incoming freshman at Stanford who said he was living alone in motels throughout high school. Supposedly Stanford let him move in a summer before his freshman year because they wanted to help him get away from the toxic environment he was living in.
I found (free) summer programs for my D here on CC as well. They really got her fired up about school and college and I think about what she learned at them (not only academically but socially - I thank them for her confidence moving into her freshman dorm this year).
I do understand your point to @Roger_Dooley, but I think you are being too literal with the term scholarship in this case. I would just as strongly argue that, especially for the Ivy League schools where every accepted applicant is a scholar of the highest order of achievement (i.e. top 1-2% of all students in academic achievement), that just because it is need based as to whether the university decides to waive all costs or some costs, the student is in such a position to receive that award based on merit of the highest order. That, in fact, is the reason the Ivy League schools don’t award merit scholarships of the type as you define them (let’s call them “merit-only” for lack of my ability to think of a better term). How would they do it? All their students, pretty much, are worthy of the highest of merit-only scholarships, and in fact if they applied to schools that award such scholarships they would no doubt receive them in the vast majority of cases.
So yes, she did receive this award because of her merit as a scholar, thus justifying the term scholarship. The fact that it has a second criterion of need doesn’t make it less of a scholarship earned because of merit.
We should be literal with the term Scholarship. As it was already mentioned upthread Yale calls their grant a Scholarship on their Financial Award Letter.
