<p>To the OP: I have a $10k a year merit scholarship, and I didn’t get in to Harvard. Sure, there are some students who receive them and turn them down (my sister, for example, who also got a $10k but chose to attend Macalester College in St. Paul, MN) but they are not necessarily the people you’d expect. I had good stats, slightly above average for UChicago but not by much (33 ACT, 3.9 GPA) and the other students I know on campus who have merit scholarships are as surprisingly human as I am. A lot can be said about putting effort and passion in to ECs, showing skills and talents, and especially writing good and creative essays (but not just for creativity’s sake-- creatively representative of you and the way you actually are). My essays were a fictitious historical analysis of the party hat (don’t try this one again), a very simple, straightforward, and oozing-with-love Why Chicago, and a short paragraph about why I like the guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen. Show yourself through your essays, and don’t try to write what you think people want to hear from “generic college applicant X”-- 1,500 other people will do that. Only you know what goes on in your brain, and why your brain will be perfect here, and if you can get that across you are going to be vastly closer to merit scholarship territory than a person with great stats but no life.</p>
<p>So, the robo-Harvard übermensch with amazing stats and no personality is not the type that gets these… I’m still not sure how the scholarship committee identifies the UChicago “spark” in potential merit recipients, but everyone I have met who has a merit scholarship and has chosen to attend definitely has it, and got their award based on that and their personal achievements, not just test scores.</p>