Just sharing this to give some people hope!
SAT : 1200 ( 530 M & 670 RW)
UW GPA : 3.9
W GPA : 4.4
Rank: Top 3 % (14/550)
I took all honors and AP courses and had strong letters of recommendations. Did not do the supplement essays but I did complete the personal essay. Lots of ECs . Varisty captain for volleyball.
In-State
Selected Pre-Medicine as my major
Accepted into Dietrich with the welcome video
Applied : Jan 1
Accepted : Jan 27
Congratulations!
Son had financial aid show up on the portal: just the $5.5K federal unsubsidized loan.
(Application info in post #7)
@TheVulcan that’s crazy. Thankfully it sounds like your son has some great options. But I just don’t get it.
Thanks, @Susanb33. Yeah, just following this for statistical purposes at this point (have a younger one to go through this rodeo with in a few years), and reporting for posterity:-) I know I scoured many an old CC thread to try to better understand the landscape…
Since it seems at this point your S will not be attending Pitt, I encourage you to decline his offer.
The concern is that if your S becomes a Chancellor nominee, he will in fact take that opportunity away from another applicant, as my understanding is Pitt does not have a ‘waitlist’ of Chancellor candidates…they invite up to 80 students to interview and if one of those students declines the interview that slot is lost (not backfilled).
Of course if your S would attend Pitt if offered the Chancellor scholarship, then by all means keep his name in the mix.
Good luck.
Financial aid showed up today. $7k panther pride award, $5500 in loans. Helps out but I don’t think pitt will end up being affordable for me
If my DD has gotten a merit scholarship already (we are grateful) does that mean she is not likely to be in the running for the Chancellor scholarship?
Whether or not that is indeed the case (I know that GT, for example, notifies Stamps semifinalist alternates in case some semifinalists decide not to proceed), if son is offered a spot but does not participate in the interview process, it will not affect the number of actual scholarships available to other students.
You could, of course, say that it takes away a chance from some other kid to interview, but the corollary to that is it increases chances of some third kid who will have one less competitor. So it’s a wash in the end. And since colleges can predict their yields pretty accurately, including yields for scholarship offers, all of these possible scenarios are basically already accounted for.
In the past years, those invites arrived with some of the larger scholarship offers. Looks like it may have changed since no one reported receiving Chancellor’s invite yet this year, it seems.
I would imagine those offered a chance to compete for Chancellors would also be offered some smaller scholarship to walk away with. Otherwise Pitt would basically be disenfranchising a majority of the strongest admitted students who are offered a shot at Chancellors. Though I am not sure what the logistics would be.
@TheVulcan --are you triple dog sure the test score received by Pitt is the ACT 36 and not an earlier test score? It really seems incredulous there is no merit at this point.
Read the U of Miami EA thread. Seems like they asked top kids to apply for full scholarships. They had to write essays on short notice over Christmas break. Some kids who did got deferred. Talk about insult.
@carachel2, yes, 36 in every subject area Sophomore year, sent directly from ACT, and showing on the portal.
The way GT does it with Stamps is they nominate 325 EA admitted students as semifinalists, and after the first round of local or video interviews 100 finalists are invited for on-campus events and interviews.
There, 40 are offered Stamps (full ride plus), and the rest receive Gold scholarship, which is a full tuition for in-state and a discount to in-state tuition for OOS. Their yield rate with Gold seems pretty low though (around 30%).
…Though he should have gotten something even if we accidentally sent his middle school score of 35:-)
I was thinking maybe there was indeed something they didn’t like about his essays (I thought they were fine, but who knows) - but then he got into honors.
The whole thing was a bit unnerving at first as we were beginning to think his application was not as compelling for other schools as we thought it was.
Now that we have other results, it really is a puzzle.
DD’s portal updated today with a $6,500 Panther Pride award. It was totally unexpected, but we are grateful. H2P!
Is there an email or letter sent to inform you of merit awards?
@sb12345 nah you gotta check the financial aid awards on your portal
Thank you!
My daughter received a $5500 unsubsidized loan in her portal. She has 1540 SAT and 4.25 UW GPA out of 4.3 and very involved, unique ECs. She did all of the essays. Not going to lie, we are very disappointed. We even went to a blue and gold day, which was a 12 hour drive each way. She has received around $20,000/year from all the other schools she has heard from (5 so far) and a full ride at our in state school. She is still waiting to hear from 6 more schools in late March but I can say that Pitt is now officially off her list. I guess that’s one way to narrow down choices!