Yesterday, I discussed a couple of early steps I had to take to prepare for graduation. There was more to come.
Every year, the seniors get a chance to apply for local scholarships. A number of the civic organizations gave out money left and right to seniors who were going to college. I signed up for the ones that I qualified for. There was literally thousands of dollars' worth of scholarships to be had.
I already had received a $200 academic scholarship to attend Eastern New Mexico University. (Yeah, you may think that wasn't a lot of money, but the total cost of my four-year college education came to $10,000. $200 was 2% of that amount.) I was hoping to build upon that.
I didn't get any of the local scholarships. I was really let down by that. On the bright side, we didn't have any one student monopolize all the scholarships, as had happened in previous years. They were evenly spread around. There were a couple of students who got two of them, but no one got more than $800 total.
One day, the school announced that a couple of other organizations had new scholarships to offer. I went down and applied for them.
One day, a police officer came to my house asking for me. My Mom was with me. He told me he was from the Fraternal Order of Police and that I was chosen to receive the organization's first scholarship ever for $500. I was shocked. I thought I was going to walk away with nothing. He said that the reason I was chosen was because of my being involved in the department's Law Enforcement Explorers program. Wow, four years of working football and bingo games paid off.
It was nice to have a couple of scholarships under my belt. I was proud of myself. However, several months later, I found out that I should have gotten some other scholarships. One of the people who got two scholarships was the girl who led DECA's Free Enterprise project. She received the DECA scholarship and the Rotary scholarship for a total of about $700. Mom told me I was the first runner-up for both of those. This wouldn't have been a big deal, but that girl only went to college for one semester and came back home. That means her scholarships were basically wasted because she probably just went to school and partied the whole time.
The choir also had a scholarship for $200. However, one of the stipulations was that you had to either major or minor in music. I knew I wasn't going to pursue music in college, so I didn't apply for it. However, I found out later that I didn't have a minor listed during my first year of college. This means I could have listed music as a minor for my freshman year, participated in the choir and then change my minor later on. (Yeah, I know. This would have made me almost as bad as the girl mentioned above.) I would have been a shoo-in for the scholarship because the girl who won was not an academic achiever. She was probably the only person to apply. (It was the girl who won "Most Talented" in my class.)
So that was an extra $900 in scholarships that could have been mine under different circumstances. In the end, it really didn't make a difference because my parents had all the money I needed already. They had been saving up for me and Loyd since we were born.
We'll get closer to graduation in Monday's post.
No comments:
Post a Comment