<p>I was an administrator for a scholarship program and when we googled a lot of what we were trying to find out was about ‘family circumstances/situation’ as the original article said. What wasn’t clear in the article is that what we were trying to figure out were things like ‘if the kid won a state-level science fair for an engineering project, were both of his parents engineers? Did the kid have an internship in a lab that a parent or two worked at? Did the kid who won the poetry award or the national creative writing award also have parents that were published authors? Did the kid who won the symphony concerto competition have a parent who went to Julliard?" KNowing these facts doesn’t make the kids’ accomplishment less significant, but it does provide context. THere actually is a difference between the kid who finds his own internship, takes the bus across town by himself, and takes on two part-time jobs so he can afford the unpaid internship – and the kid who rolls out of bed and into mom or dad’s car where he then goes to work at their lab and comes home afterward and swims in their pool in their expensive house. Both kids may be equally smart and accomplished but one might actually be somewhat more motivated.</p>