<p>Notifications for out of state and international applicants were posted today. I am an out of state applicant from Nevada. Just wondering who else is a semifinalist!</p>
<p>Congratulations @alleycat2 !! What do you consider the strength of your application? Service, ECs, essays, stats, etc.?</p>
<p>Thanks @Joe2015 ! I feel like my strength is that I have a little bit of everything… For service, I have 400+ hours with a few organizations that I love. For ECs, I dedicate a lot of my time to ballet and two school clubs (one of which I founded). I would say that one of my essays was strong and definitely helped me, but the other wasn’t that great. And for stats, I am ranked #1 in a class of 310 people, and did really well on the CR and W portions of the SAT. However, I didn’t do so great on the math. So I think having a good balance of all that stuff is what helped me on the app :)</p>
<p>Very impressive @alleycat2 ! Good luck moving forward in this process.</p>
<p>Hey! I am an in-state semifinalist for the Morehead-Cain. I felt like my application was decent enough but I really want to nail this interview! @alleycat2 and @Joe2015, I was wondering if you guys have any tricks or tips for the interview? This is definitely not my forte! I have looked up different possible questions, such as “Why Do You Deserve This Scholarship?,” “Who Has Influenced You In a Positive Way?” and the dreaded “Tell Us About Yourself.” I’m really looking for little tricks to help not be so nervous or how to handle questions that I am not prepared for or may not have a really great answer to. Also, good luck @alleycat2! </p>
<p>@dafowler328 Hey congrats! I actually already found out I didn’t advance to finalist, so the in-state/out-of-state processes are different. I had a skype interview and I felt like I did really well, but I guess there were just some other candidates that were better. I bet the in person interview will be slightly different, but here is what I did: Like you, I researched a ton of scholarship questions. I also spent hours researching UNC and every unique aspect of the school so I could answer why I wanted to go to the school and what I could bring to the school. I wrote down a lot of information about the history of Morehead Cain and also the history of UNC. I memorized quirky school traditions that I might be able to bring up and show how interested I was. In addition to all of that stuff, I really spent a lot of time looking at the major I had applied for and what I could do with it at UNC.
So after doing all of this, I felt extremely prepared. I even did a few practice interviews with my dad and recorded them so I could fix my flaws. But when my interviewer started asking me things, it was like she was just asking me to restate everything in my application. I reiterated my extracurriculars, she asked about specific things I had written in the short answers and essays, and I talked about all of my volunteer work. There were zero questions pertaining to the actual scholarship (why do you deserve this?) or the school, which I thought was odd. The only non-application question was about my favorite book, which was an easy one to answer. I’m really bad at on the spot stuff too, so I recommend having a huge arsenal of information ready for this. Being prepared is the best way to handle pre-interview anxiety. I hope you do well! Let me know if you have any other questions about my interview.</p>
Hey guys! Is anyone else a Morehead-Cain Finalist? I would love to know how you’re preparing for the weekend!
Hey @clarelmac, congrats 
I’m a finalist as well (OOS), but not sure how I should prepare either! The binder just says to review your application, so I was going to start by doing that.
@clarelmac and @meandmycat congratulations on being finalists! A friend of mine is a 2018 Morehead Cain Scholar and is over the moon with the program.
Is there a list of 2019 finalists posted online?
@meandmycat I’m so excited for the weekend! In terms of prep, I actually scheduled a few practice board interviews to lessen my nerves and clean up my responses for the actual ones. The application will definitely be the meat of the conversation though, so reading over it multiple times is key – I guess it’ll be similar to in-state semis? Did you have a Skype interview being OOS?
@Joe2015 I don’t believe they’ve posted them online, but finalists received a pretty extensive packet with contact info of each and every finalist. This scholarship is definitely the dream!
Any recent information?