The sort of scholarships you have to go for when you don't have a 3.0 GPA

Wicked223

Vera Yip Memorial Scholarship
Provided by : Ulman Cancer Fund for Young Adults
Award: $2500 Deadline: April 01, 2012
The Vera Yip Memorial Scholarship is available to college students whose lives have been impacted by cancer. You must be under the age of 35 and a cancer survivor or patient who was diagnosed while between the ages of 15 and 35 or you must have parents or guardians diagnosed with cancer while you were between the ages of 15 and 35. You must be attending or accepted to a four-year college or university and seeking a bachelors degree or higher to be eligible for this award.

Young Naturalist Award
Provided by : American Museum of Natural History
Award: $2500 Deadline: March 09, 2012
Young Naturalist Award is available to students in grades seven through twelve who are currently enrolled in a public, parochial, or home school. You must plan and conduct your own scientific expedition, one which will provide original data, questions, and observations on a topic in the natural sciences. An essay is required to be considered for this award.

Milton Fisher Scholarship for Innovation and Creativity
Provided by : Renee B. Fisher Foundation
Award: $5000 Deadline: April 30, 2012
The Milton Fisher Scholarship for Innovation and Creativity is available to high school juniors and seniors, and entering and current college freshmen. You must be a resident of, or be planning to attend school in Connecticut or the New York City metropolitan area. To be eligible, you must demonstrate how you have solved artistic, scientific, or technical problems in new or unusual ways; how you have come up with distinctive solutions to problems faced by your school, community, or family; or how you have developed an innovative way to save the environment or improve people's health.

Healthy Lifestyles Scholarship
Provided by : Stay Fit Ltd.
Award: $5000 Deadline: May 30, 2012
The Healthy Lifestyles Scholarship is open to high school seniors and first-year college students. You must be a citizen of the U.S. or Canada and be under 25 years of age to be eligible for this award. You must also submit a maximum 1000-word essay on the following topic: "Why is a healthy lifestyle important in school?"; and in under 500 words, describe your career plans, goals, and personal ambitions.

Fountainhead Essay Contest
Provided by : Ayn Rand Institute
Award: $1000 0Deadline: April 26, 2012
The Fountainhead Essay Contest is open worldwide to 11th and 12th graders. You must write an essay of no fewer than 800 and no more than 1,600 words on a topic relating to Ayn Rand's novel, "The Fountainhead." Topics can be found on the sponsor's Web site. Essays are judged on both style and content. The winning essay must demonstrate an outstanding grasp of the philosophic meaning of "The Fountainhead." All information necessary to enter the contest is contained on the sponsor's site.

OneChild Africa Essay Contest
Provided by : OneChild Africa
Award: $500 Deadline: January 31, 2012
The OneChild Africa Essay Contest is available to high school and homeschool students who are under the age of 19. To be considered, you must submit a 1400 - to 1500 - word essay that examines, and reflects on, the plight of children in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly children who have been orphaned due to AIDS. In your essay, you must consider the ways in which you, and other young people like you, can improve the lives of children in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Icalasari

...Wow I really suck at finding scholarships

RedEyedAbyss

I'd imagine one must feel like a dick for getting one of those just because no one else applied.

Wicked223

...Wow I really suck at finding scholarships

This is where I found all of those, maybe you could try that?

I'd imagine one must feel like a dick for getting one of those just because no one else applied.

heh.

but $10000 dollars for writing an essay about The Fountainhead can't be that unpopular, can it?

Icalasari

^ I have a feeling that the scholarships there are US only =/

RedEyedAbyss

But that would require actually reading The Fountainhead, and I think most high school kids (and postsecondary kids, for that matter) would rather do other things than get indoctrinated into a political cult.

glennmagusharvey

I didn't know what The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand were back then, and I was just too lazy to read those books and then write essays about them.

Apparently this was an advisable course of action, considering what I now know about Rand.

RedEyedAbyss

I have some bizarre fixation on Ayn Rand mostly because her views run the gamut from laughably naive to utterly repulsive (what she said about Native Americans, for one).

InsanityAddict

Sparknotes+essay bundle on The Fountainhead=no need to actually read the book.

glennmagusharvey

Hey, that's how I get away with talking about animé series I've never watched and videogames I've never played.

MillerCross

Except you never get away with it.

LouieW

Abyss_Worm,
But that would require actually reading The Fountainhead, and I think most high school kids (and postsecondary kids, for that matter) would rather do other things than get indoctrinated into a political cult.

Not much of a fan of Ayn Rand I guess? Granted, I have not read much of her work, but I am not sure why she deserves more disdain than any other particularly objectionable philosopher. I am interested in hearing what she has to say about Native Americans though.

Wicked223,

Have you tried fastweb? I hear that it helps some people find scholarships.

glennmagusharvey

> than any other particularly objectionable philosopher

Was this pun intended?

RedEyedAbyss

"They didn't have any rights to the land, and there was no reason for anyone to grant them rights which they had not conceived and were not using. What was it that they were fighting for, when they opposed white men on this continent? For their wish to continue a primitive existence, their 'right' to keep part of the earth untouched, unused and not even as property, but just keep everybody out so that you will live practically like an animal, or a few caves above it. Any white person who brings the element of civilization has the right to take over this continent."

And for more fun, the infamous tunnel disaster in Atlas Shrugged. tl'dr, if you even dare entertain socialist thoughts, your life is worthless and you deserve to die. It almost reaches the levels of black comedy in the sheer pettiness displayed ("The woman in Roomette 6, Car no. 8, was a lecturer who believed that, as a consumer, she had "a right" to transportation, whether the railroad people wished to provide it or not." How utterly heinous. This coming from the person who apparently took advantage of Medicare anyway.), but the black far outweighs the comedy.

glennmagusharvey

That said, you probably have to make heavy use of Poe's Law if you don't actually agree with Rand's philosphy but want to win the prize from the group specifically trying to promote her works.

Malkavian

Louie: A big part of it is that she's actually not a very good philosopher. Many of her arguments lie on tautologies like 'a is a to prove her point. She's very imprecise in her language and verbose, see the sixty page monologue by John Galt in Atlas Shrugged.  

She herself was also very much a terrible person. Not only the stuff, Abyss posted, but in her personal life. She was dismissive of any other women trying to get into philosophy, (and even said women's rights weren't in the interest of women) she also had an affair with her husband, used her philosophy to rationalize and went on a legacy-destroying shit-fit when he did the same.

The big thing about Rand is that she takes good advice for self-actualizing and turns it into a rationalization of sociopathy.

Everything good about Rand can be found in other philosophers like Nietzche and Kierkegaard. Everything bad is unique. 

LouieW

Abyss_Worm,

Well, that does sound inconsiderate to say the least. Maybe I should read Atlas Shrugged some day so I can be a bit more objective about this. Yes, glennmagusharvey, while that last pun was not intended this one was.

The idea that Native Americans did not have civilizations at the time that Europeans arrived seems pretty weird to me too, at least if you use agriculture as a measure of civilization (as I think people have done historically).

Malkavian,

Thanks for giving me some more information about this. I am not sure that Ayn Rand's personal life matters much in evaluating her philosophy, but I do wonder why people subscribe to that philosophy if it really is as bad as you say it is. I mean, I certainly am not a fan based off of the little I have read, but it seems like there are people who like her work, at least judging based off of that Ayn Rand Institute scholarship essay, and I would like to know what reasons they have for supporting objectivism.

Malkavian

I think Ayn Rand's personal life matters... at least a little since it shows that she didn't really act in accordance to her own philosophy. Keep in mind, many people deify her in a fashion similar Founding Fathers of America.

As for why people like her.... well, I can't give a reason for all of them but I think that it's because for all of her statements on the glory of logic over emotion, she appeals heavily to emotion by talking about self-esteem and being good to oneself.

I should also point out that while there are a lot of Rand fans and fanatics. Most of them are political. Very few are actual philosophers.

Which isn't to say there aren't libertarian philosophers. They'd just probably reference Locke before Rand. 

captainbrass

^^^ The last sentence there reminds me of Dr Johnson.

"Sir, your work is both good and original. Unfortunately, the part which is good is not original and the part which is original is not good."

Ponicalica

I suspect that's the point, @captainbrass.