About a month ago I confirmed with ND that no application for need-based financial aid, or filing of the FAFSA or PROFILE, is necessary to be to be considered for merit scholarships (and that not applying/filing has no negative impact on being considered for merit scholarships). I don’t know anything about merit scholarships outside of the major merit scholarship award programs mentioned in my post above. I think those selected/nominated for the major merit programs have been contacted by now, but can’t say for certain. The only other thing I have heard is that those students invited to attend one of the two Reilly weekends (one for EA, one for RD - see http://admissions.nd.edu/reilly/) are among the candidates for merit awards - which makes sense because ND invites what they consider to be their top ~80 kids from EA and RD rounds to those weekends. Obviously with far fewer merit scholarships than the ~160 kids invited to those weekends, even being invited to a Reilly weekend is far from an assurance of merit aid. The Reilly weekend for the EA admittees was this past weekend; I don’t know when invites go out for Reilly weekend for the RD admittees.