Other Stuff

So my oldest just graduated from high school and I can’t help but compare his applying for college scholarships to my querying agents.  I guess some would find applying to colleges equally humbling, but my awesome son managed to get accepted at EVERY SCHOOL HE APPLIED TO—we’re still amazed at this considering how tough it is to get into some of these schools.  The seemingly endless scholarship opportunities out there were a much different story, however.

He ended up applying for fifteen different scholarships. Most of them required answering pages and pages of mind-numbing questions, doing art projects, supplying transcripts, tax forms and other documents, writing essays . . .  Trying to get my son to write even a one page essay was the reason we applied to 15 scholarships and not 50.  Deadlines would come and go.  Others he just simply refused to attempt.  And all the while he was doing projects for school, studying for finals and AP exams, doing all that stuff for graduation, etc.

And how many scholarships did he get?  One.  One scholarship.   And that was the state scholarship he was awarded for four years of hard work, community volunteer hours and awesome SAT scores.  The rest of the scholarships were all “Nos”.  Or, more precisely and in querying lingo, they were all “Closed, no response”.

I have to admit my husband and I were much more disappointed than my son was.  In fact, I doubt he felt the sting of rejection at all—except maybe for the couple of creative projects he worked on.  When we went to school we didn’t have to do any of this.  Going to college didn’t cost a fortune back then.

Of course, we get to do it all over again with the other two kids in a few years.  We have that to look forward to.

The picture is an original work by the graduate.