national merit college sponsored?

E1A
Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:10:36 +0000

I couldn’t take it anymore so I called the office and had a 15 minute conversation with one of their service people, here’s the deal.

First, out of the Finalists approx 8200 Scholarships are awarded, these consist of the 2500, school and corporate scholarships.

THE $2500 recipients are selected by a committee and will become National Merit Scholars upon accepting the award

The Corporate sponsored ones are only open to certain finalists, if you are eligible and a finalist, your name is sent to the company and they decide whether or not they want to offer you a scholarship - if they do and you accept (you presumably would) you become a National Merit Scholar

The rest of the 8200 are school sponsored. You all know about the first choice deal and what not so I’ll cut to the chase. First, you will not be given any other offer from National Merit. They give your name to your “first choice” and that school decides whether or not to give you a scholarship. If they do that is your offer and according to this woman the money comes from the school.
If you accept the school sponsored scholarship you become a NMS, but if you don’t then you only have the distinction of a finalist. THis is a travesty in my opinion because the whole first choice shcool thing is confusing enough as is. THe way to avoid getting a school offer until later is to mark undecided - which seems obvious now. Otherwise you will recieve an offer and that is it - accept become a scholar - or deny and stay a finalist. THis seems wierd to me. The deadline to Change 1st choice was 4/19 - but of course some schools hadn’t sent some people aid packages yet – so the way to go was undecided.

Immensely frustrating and pointless, but hope this cleared some things up