Scholarship Applications

For the past two years I have volunteered to review a few dozen scholarship applications on behalf of the Delaware Community Foundation.  I do my best to blind myself to the personal information and just look at the transcripts, recommendations, activities outside the classroom, and essays.  I particularly like reading the essays.  This year the students had a relatively open challenge of picking a problem and solving it.  Subjects ranged from saving the honeybees to ending bullying to the correction of climate change.  The topic really mattered less than what they did with it.  Some very clever and insightful kids and some that spouted uncritically what they read on the internet.  All but one had a job.  I do not know how many had cars.

I think like a doctor, looking at each presentation as an individual but keeping an eye out for patterns.  I wonder if grading should be more uniform across Delaware.  There were far too many outstanding transcripts that did not match SAT scores, some not even close.  All recommendations got a top score by the person writing the recommendation but what distinguished one student from another may be the detail of what was written or even the caliber of the writing than an accurate verbal portrait of the student. 

These applicants all had motivation and focus, at a time when peers of the same age acquire untreated depression, assaults to their self-esteem, or other forms of rejection.

The people who should be looking at these summaries of achievement might not be me, but professors from the Schools of Education at the University of  Delaware or University of Pennsylvania or perhaps the state Department of Education.  Our schools nurture some very worthy kids but opportunities to design studies that examine some of the results more thoroughly and more systematically can upgrade further.