Blogging Scholarship

Blogging Scholarship Last year Jess wrote about a blogging scholarship that she had entered and became a finalist in. Gee, I thought, A blogging scholarship. Well, Im not a woman, a minority, I dont have a parent in a particular industry, Im not the smartest in my class or major, and I havent done anything Nobel Prize worthy, so I dont really qualify for other scholarships, but I could definitely go for a blogging scholarship. Unfortunately, I heard about it just a bit late last year and couldnt apply, which is probably for the better because Jess won $1,000 and probably would have bumped me out of the running. This year, however, I applied and after about a week of waiting the finalists were announced. With five times as many applicants as last year, Im extremely excited to announce that I am one of the top twenty finalists! Before I make my pitch Id like to share my short essay that I submitted to apply. My blogging began during my junior year of high school. Like the majority of angsty high schoolers, I started a blog because I was angry at life and felt like spilling my deepest, darkest secrets onto the Internet for everybody to read. Unlike the majority of angsty high schoolers, after I signed up for my blog I decided *not* to be angsty. Instead, I wanted to compile all of my most awesome stories, the coolest stuff I found on the Internet, and other random Internet fodder that I find entertaining. No drama, no gossip, no deep emotional musings. Entertainment, funny pictures, and stories. Thats it. My personal blog was around for about two years before I started writing my blog for the MIT Admissions website. A lot of the blogs for MIT were very informative and very factual but not very fun to read. My goal? Write entries for MIT that not only were informative and factual, but also toed that line between appropriate and ridiculously off topic and random. I wanted people to *want* to read my blogs, to start and not be able to stop, to be entertained, but at the end feel like they know a little more about MIT. Maybe not directly, but sometimes the best information is absorbed indirectly and unknowingly. My blog entries tell stories about eating contests, danger signs, snowball fights, LEGOs, toys, and all sorts of MITs lesser known tidbits. Sometimes I get yelled at for being off topic. I dont care. I still strive to fill the Internet with awesome and will continue to do so on into the future. So, that being said, if you can find it within you to do so, please vote for me. A $10,000 scholarship would be huge (MIT is kind of expensive). Heres a link to the site where you can vote: If youd like to post the link yourself on your blog, or just spread it around to help me out, its http://www.collegescholarships.org/blog/2008/11/06/vote-for-the-winner-of-the-2008-blogging-scholarship/. Voting ends at 11:59pm PST on Thursday, November 20th, 2008 so go out and vote! Thanks a ton you guys, I dont mean to essentially blog a commercial but, well, I kind of am. Ill make up for it, I promise : ) Blogging Scholarship Recently Evans mother, who is, for the record, so cool, sent the bloggers an email about a $10,000 scholarship for any bloggers who attend college. I happen to fit both of those descriptions, so I (who happened to be in New York with high school friends for the weekend; more on this later) scrambled to borrow a laptop and sent in an application. And Im a finalist. A lot of the time Im not very serious but Im serious when I say blogging has become one of the most important parts of my life at MIT. I became a blogger before I was even a student here, just before orientation but its not because Ive been doing it for so long, its the response from you guys. Getting your comments and immediate feedback about my writing is an incredible thing. So Im asking for just a little more response from you I need your help voting. If youve enjoyed anything Ive written thus far, or just like clicking on things, please vote for me: If youd like to post the link yourself on your blog, or just spread it around to help me out, its http://www.collegescholarships.org/blog/2007/10/08/vote-for-the-winner-of-the-2007-blogging-scholarship/. And if youre curious about my application essay, thats fair game too: Applying to college is a terrifying process. The applications are all filled with the same vague questions, such as, where do you see yourself in ten years? (Im supposed to know at 18?), or describe a hardship, (this.) In essence, you’re asked to squeeze your entire identity into a couple sheets of paper and turn it over to the judgment of complete strangers. And MITs nerd school reputation, while appealing for those of us with flash drives sewn into our pants, doesnt make the process any less intimidating either. To me, blogging is bridging this overwhelming chasm; blogging is dissolving the sterotype like a polar protic solute in dimethyl sulfoxide. Blogging is interrogating multiple professors in the humanities and psychology departments so Ill know how to fully answer an applicants questions, or being painfully honest about the terror of flying to college for the first time. Blogging is being careful not to reveal how little Ive slept this week so my mom won’t yell about my poor time management, and why is it that she finds out more about my life from the internet than from actual phone calls? I try to return what the admissions blogs gave me as a high school senior, when I followed them voraciously. Admissions-related questions remain the focus of my entries, but I also write about what I do besides problem sets the CPR class I helped organize, hugging Judah Friedlander at Harvard, sleeping outside in Killian Court with my shoes off because my primary goal is to convey that students at MIT are real people. I put myself out there not as a name, not as just an MIT student, but an identity squeezed into a few HTML pages. I try to give high school students the courage to do the same. Your support means the world to me. Thanks for reading!