Is My Mom Right About What It Takes To Get A High School Scholarship? What We Learned Asking Past Recipients
Last Tuesday, I was wiping crumbs off the kitchen counter at 9:30 pm, after my 11th grader Javi finished his post-soccer practice microwave popcorn, when he slid his phone across the granite toward me. “I posted it,” he said, shifting from foot to foot like he was waiting for a test grade. “I asked the scholarship group if you’re right.”
What I’d said, two nights earlier when he was stress-crumpling his course registration form, was that anyone who tells you you need a 4.0 unweighted GPA and a dozen extracurriculars to get a merit scholarship is selling you something. I said that most kids who earn big scholarships don’t build their entire high school career around checking boxes for applications. I said committees remember the kid who cares about one thing enough to stick with it, even when it’s boring or doesn’t go their way, way more than they remember the kid with 10 one-year club memberships and a perfect transcript.
Javi had heard differently from his friend Luka, who’d spent all summer listing every possible activity he could add to his resume and was already talking about retaking the SAT to bump his score 30 points. “What if you’re wrong?” Javi asked me. “What if I end up with no money for college because I listened to you?” So I told him if he didn’t believe me, he should ask people who’d actually done it. I’d joined a local Facebook group for high school students and recent grads who’d earned full or partial merit scholarships a few months back, to get info for Javi, and I told him he could post his question anonymously if he wanted.
Over the next three days, 42 responses rolled in. I sat next to Javi at the breakfast table on Saturday and we read through them together, coffee for me, orange juice for him. Some of the responses were exactly what I thought they’d be. A 2022 grad who got a full tuition scholarship to our state university wrote that she had a 3.6 unweighted GPA, worked 20 hours a week at the downtown grocery store all four years of high school, and only listed three activities on her application: work, taking care of her younger brother with autism, and a small change she’d made to the store’s snack aisle to add more allergy-friendly options after her brother had a reaction there. She wrote that her interviewer told her that story was the reason she got the scholarship over 10 other applicants with higher GPAs.
A 2021 grad who got a national STEM scholarship wrote that he failed AP Chemistry sophomore year, retook it and got a B, and spent almost all his free time building drones from discarded parts he bought at the thrift store to map trash buildup in the local creek. He only listed two non-school activities: the drone project and the robotics team he stayed on for three years, even though they never placed higher than third at any regional competition. He ended his note with, “My mom said the same thing your mom said. I thought she was wrong. She wasn’t.”
Only two responses pushed back a little, and both made sense. One grad wrote that you do need to meet the minimum GPA cut off for most scholarships, so you can’t skip homework to mess around with drones, but that doesn’t mean you need a 4.0. Most cut offs are 3.0 or 3.2, and anything over that doesn’t give you that much of a boost. The other wrote that if you’re going after a very competitive national scholarship, you do need strong grades, but even then, committees don’t care how many activities you have.
I worked the front desk at a small private college’s admissions office for three years before Javi was born, so I’ve seen this play out firsthand. We’d stack applications in piles after the first read, and every single one of the “perfect” applications — 4.0, 12 activities, every award possible — blended together after the first ten. You couldn’t tell one kid from the next. The applications that got pulled aside for a second read were always the ones with a specific, messy, personal story that no other kid could write.
The practical part of this, for any other parent stressing about this with their kid, isn’t some big speech about balance. It’s small, concrete things you can do this week. Next time your kid starts panicking about their resume, sit down with them and do this: have them list every activity they’re in, then have them cross off anything they wouldn’t do if they didn’t need it for college. What’s left is what should go front and center on their application. If your kid wants to add an extra class or activity, make sure it’s something they actually care about, not just something they think looks good. If they’re stuck on what to write their essay about, tell them to write about the time their project failed, not just the time it worked. That’s the stuff people remember.
Javi still hasn’t made a final call about whether he’s adding that extra AP to his schedule next year. He still worries sometimes that he’s not doing enough, that he’ll end up with too much student loan debt because he wanted to keep gardening and playing soccer instead of checking more boxes. But he crossed debate club and the hospital volunteer shift off his list already, and he’s working on a practice scholarship essay about the year half his vegetable starts died because he didn’t account for our town’s weird late spring frost. It’s messy, it’s specific, and it’s entirely his.
We don’t know yet if it’ll be enough to get him a scholarship. That’s still out of our hands. But what we do know is that even if it doesn’t work out, he won’t have spent the last two years of high school miserable just to impress a group of people he’ll never meet. That feels like a win either way, right now.
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