Seth Kinast’s Blog

So I was nominated for something called the Presidential Scholars Program; it’s funded by the government and gives the winners a trip to Washington D.C. and other goodies. Some stats on it:

• Top one one-hundredth of one percent of all high school seniors nominated (~2,100)
• ~140 of nominees selected as Scholars
• (a) + (b) = I have no chance (lol)

So basically like the uber-leet MSA, which I DID go to. X fingers, here goes nothing, I’ll apply.

The above was all about a month ago, when I received the letter. Little did I know how much applying for this thing would involve.

Having the procrastinating nature I do, I managed to put off writing the six essays and filling out the forms (which are all online, by the way. That’s important, so keep it in mind) until this past week. In a frenetic frenzy of filling out forms, I got very little sleep (and very little accomplished) this week. But ah well. I digress. Basically, I had finished most of the essay stuff by Friday. I began to submit it to the online application, and my beautiful Mozilla PowerOyster spit back copious amounts of errors regarding ColdFusion’s inability to process my data (which makes sense, since ColdFusion is just about the worst language I can think of for database control. Bah ColdFusion.) So I e-mailed the government’s version of tech support (bah bureaucracy) and tried to get help. I received an e-mail telling me that the problem had been fixed… yeah, right. It wasn’t. After trying Internet Explorer, I got the same problem. So finally I came up to my school and used their oooolllld computers / browsers to input the data. The government must design everything for Internet Explorer 4. Sheesh.

That milestone aside, I realized that I still needed a recommender to, um, recommend me. My original letter explained that the recommender password was sent to my principal. Bad move. He gets things like that all the time and throws them away. So I had to CALL the government this time and get new passwords set up, but their computers are down so they can’t do anything. The lady promised to call me back (and did just a couple hours later) with the passwords. However, she mentioned in passing that my transcript, SAT scores, ACT scores, etc. had to be submitted by mail. Oh yeah, and they had to be received by MONDAY. It’s now Saturday @ 12:30, and FedEx stops accepting overnight delivery at 4:00. I had to round up all the documents and get them sealed and signed. Impossible, yes… unless your father happens to teach at said school. So everything worked out in the mail portion; it got sent on time. My ever-so-wonderful headmaster wrote the recommendations, and I sent everything off online with hours to spare.

Except for one thing. The government decided that they would EXTEND the deadline without telling anyone… so I could have worked on my essays some more AND saved the $16 for overnighting a letter. Bah.