LEHS Senior Upset with Scholarship Gimmicks

By Dan Baer / The Daily Item, March 2, 2009

LYNN - Like most high school seniors, Lynn resident Ashley Turner is racking up new friends on her Facebook page by the day, networking her way to over 730 online acquaintances as of Monday.

But Turner's push for Internet popularity is not done out of recreation like most students, rather necessity as she struggles to find funding to attend college next year despite a 4.5 grade point average and a list of extracurricular activities that could fill two web profile pages.

As her senior year winds down, Turner has sent applications to a variety of schools nationwide, from Harvard and Boston University to Duke and Stanford, but as the calendar changes to March, she finds herself in desperate need of scholarship funding to achieve the dream of attending those schools - something she says is more difficult than she ever imagined.

That is where the Facebook page comes in. A few months back, Turner applied for a $20,000 scholarship from Zinch.com with the understanding that she would be battling for votes with other students from Massachusetts and across the country.

She said as the process continued, the company kept adding more and more to the criteria, eventually telling her that whichever candidate secured the most popular Facebook page would automatically move on to the next round of 64 finalists.

Frustrated by the increasing amount of hoops she was forced to jump through for this and other scholarships, Turner says she has been forced to scale back the funding search in favor of keeping her grades up and holding down a job.

"There is something like eight different rounds and it is getting really competitive and time consuming, I can't focus my time on that," she said. "So I am just going to leave it and see what happens. I thought I was doing well, and then they said the person with the largest Facebook page gets to the round of 64. I thought I had a lot with 734 friends, but then I find out there is a girl in Thailand with like 14,000."

Despite seemingly fitting the profile of a scholarship winner, with a high GPA and a strong desire to attend college and serve the community, Turner says most of her scholarship experiences have become more like winning a TV reality show than an academic achievement.

Many federal and non-profit awards are usually geared toward minorities or those less fortunate, categories that - while she is not wealthy by any means - Turner does not fit in to. Other scholarships, like that of Zinch.com, require the candidate to be as popular as possible and secure votes to win, while others offer minuscule awards for outrageous amounts of work.

The state does offer free tuition to a state school based on high achievement on the MCAS test, but the John and Abigail Adams Award does not apply to schools that are not funded by the state of Massachusetts.

Some of Turner's horror stories include spending days filling out applications, writing essays and asking for letters of recommendations for what turned out to be a $500 award - or in one case - $35 in Wendy's gift certificates.

"I have been looking at a lot of scholarships, and it just seems like there are some really crazy things they are trying to to do that are really time consuming with school," she said. "It is really discouraging, because there are thousands of scholarships out there and they make their decisions on these really nitpicky things."

Turner gives credit to the guidance staff at Lynn English High School for helping steer her in the right direction with scholarships, but says there is only so much she can do at this point.

She is planning to hear back from the schools to which she has applied soon, and is hoping some scholarship money trickles her way so that she can afford to live her dream at the school of her choice.

"I've done everything I would have thought to be successful and to get into a good school next year," she said. "But most scholarships are not academically based, you can work and work and work and it is not enough."