I was a Semi-Finalist as well. Would’ve been NMS if not for some bad grades my freshman year. In my case, I got a TON of brochures from every college in the country, including an unsolicited application to Harvard and Radcliffe which impressed me at the time. I also got several acceptance letters to colleges I wasn’t interested in and therefore hadn’t applied to. Ultimately, I got a full tuition scholarship to University of St. Thomas based on several criteria, but the NM Semi-Finalist thing was a big factor. Free college is nothing to sneeze at. Congratulations to you and your son!
Yet another NM finalist/scholar/whatever here, maybe useful because I am currently a highschool senior going to college in the fall.
The award itself is not a big deal as many others have noted, at most the NM people will give you asbout $2-3,000. Your son will have to write an essay, only about a page long, and have his counselor fill out forms with his grades, extra curriculars and other such good stuff, I believe a letter or rec. is included in the packet.
Many schools will send him mail or accept him automatically, Arizona State has told me that they will accept me on the spot and offer me a full ride scholarship aslong with about $3,000 spending money per year as long as I keep a 3.0 GPA in college. Ridiculous scholarships to schools you’ve never heard of and even phone calls telling you that you can still apply even after your college choice is made.
There are three types of scholarships your son could recieve:
- National Merit Foundation scholarship (very small)
- Schaolarship from a company where you and/or your husband is currently employed (look into this) usually small.
- University Scholarships, these are the most important and biggest. Everything is on a school to basis so do your research now. It is rather unlikely that MIT, for example, will give much money because of their reluctance in offering merit based scholarships. USC offers half tuition after an interview process with possibility for a full ride, I have already mentioned Arizona… etc. Due to financial issues I’m going to a state college that has offered me a full ride for the next four years, room, board, tuition, parking, everything is included and the support system is great.
The only thing I really have left to say is congratulations to your son and start reading up on who can give him money for college.
Kitty
IIRC, you’re a “semi-finalist” after the PSAT/NMSQT test, if you do well. And yes, the copious amounts of junk mail…
Then, he’ll have to send in a staff recommendation (principal or counselor or something), an essay, his SATs, his outside interests, and his grades to become a finalist.
After that, there’s a potential scholarship match (based on things like your (and his other parent’s) job, his interests, his choice of schools, his jobs, etc.)
Still, Congratulations to your son. It’s a good thing to have on college applications (though at some of the colleges listed, everyone there will have been a National Merit finalist)
Semi-finalist here. Would have been a finalist but, well, I was too lazy to write the essay and fill out the paperwork.
My friend, one of the other two semi-finalists from the school–but not such a lazy one, so he became a finalist or NMS–kept telling me to apply to Arizona State like he did, because they’d give me a free ride just for being a semi-finalist. I’m not sure if it was true or not; I didn’t want to go to Arizona.
Wow, there’s a lot of us here! I got a 4-year full scholarship from a small public school (Western Carolina) for being a Finalist. Got lots and lots of application forms and junk mail from every school in the country, but WCU was the only one that offered any significant money. The type of schools your son is interested in are not going to be as impressed by National Merit status as Western was, but it’s still a good thing to have on the application.
Good luck and congrats to the kid.
Another National Merit Scholar here. What I haven’t seen anyone mention (though admittedly, I didn’t read for comprehension :)) is that corporations also offer scholarships based on National Merit stuff.
Through my dad’s company, I received $3000 dollars per semester. (Immediately after that, though, they restricted their awards to students studying in fields related to the company business – which mine most definitely was not.)
All I had to do was send a thank-you note to the company each semester … and I was reminded to do so by a friendly letter from the National Merit Board (or whatever they called themselves).
Congratulations, CBCD!
One son was a semifinalist, the other was a finalist. This helped a great deal in getting into the college of their choice (Stanford), and they received a huge amount of $$$. In a sense, they were recuited much as sports scholarship students are recuited.
Long, long ago, I also was a finalist. As part of the senior year “stepping up to college rituals”, I was offered a 4 year scholarship by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and I am pretty sure that this was because of my test scores, although I can’t verify that.
I was a National Merit Scholar semifinalist–then I promptly got disqualified when the National Merit people found out that I’d taken the SAT several times previously for the Johns Hopkins CYA awards. I went to Penn State too…goodbye half-tuition scholarship 
As a NMS, I received a bajillion letters from colleges wanting me to come, even some offered full rides. The institution I selected offered me nothing, however.
I graduated high school in 2001 as a NM Scholar, and I got the same deal. I’m going to Florida State on a full scholarship (out of state tuition was waived too) and I haven’t paid a penny out of pocket. I was thinking about Ivy League schools originally but I don’t come from a real wealthy background so I took the full ride. The most attractive thing to me: If I get through my undergraduate studies in less than four years, the remainder of my scholarship (up to four years worth) will then transfer to my graduate studies, provided I stay at FSU. In other words, I can go to FSU Law school for a year on my National Merit scholarship if I graduate from FSU in three. That’s an added incentive noone else has mentioned.
Yet another one checking in. I got lots of offers from schools I had never shown any interest in, and didn’t show interest in. I ended up going to the university 15 miles away. I got a small scholarship which would have been bigger if I had filled in the right paperwork. :smack:
It seemed to me the only purpose of the essay and forms was to weed out the lazy semi-finalists.
I could be wrong, though.
P.S. I’d have gotten full tuition plus $4500 (or something like that) each year from Ohio State for being a Finalist. But of course I chose to go somewhere that didn’t do National Merit stuff.
I am surprised at the hostility about getting mail from colleges. There are over 1000 4-yr colleges and universities in this country, and the average student only knows the Ivies, the ones close to home, and the ones who do well in revenue sports. That’s a lot of colleges to not know about, some of which are fabulous places. I’ll bet a lot of high school juniors haven’t heard of Macalester. Or Washington and Lee. Or Agnes Scott. Or Colgate. Or Harvey Mudd. Or Trinity (in Texas). Or Occidental. Or Reed. Or Suwanee. Or University of Puget Sound. All decent schools, all worth looking into. It’s not all junk mail. You can use it to educate yourself and expand your college horizons.
I was a “commended” student and got loads of mail. I actually opened a lot of it, and ended up at a place I’d never heard of, 1000 miles from home. It was the making of me.
My step-son was a NMS and attended St. John’s Annapolis and loved it! It was a wonderful experience for him. As your son probably knows, the curriculum is based on The Great Books of the Western World. What an education! I think that a fairly high percentage of their students are NMS.
I was NMS and went to Florida. I never would have gone there if it hadn’t been for the junk mail I got. Basically, I got a free ride (including out-of-state tuition waved) plus a hefty check each semester which more than covered my rent. Oh yeah, and I got a $1,000 stipend my senior year. And the year after I came in, they doubled the money you get (didn’t benefit me, just the people a year younger.) I looked into a lot of offers for National Merit, and that was the best one I saw, and now it’s even better. I swear I don’t work for UF or anything, but its just a really good deal.
Anyway, research all your options and try to find a school offering a lot of money, cause they are out there.
I’ll pop back in to reinforce the ‘junk mail’ thing.
Mom and I were living in a retirement community (on a sublease) at the time I got the NMS notice. After a month or two the guys in the mailroom (full service retirement community) gave up stuffing our mail in the box and just had a big postal bin set up with my name on it in the mailroom. I’d get home from school, head to the mailroom, pick up the stuff, say hello and head to the apartment.
I considered papering my rooms with them.
True enough, but a) think of all those dead trees! and b) did MIT and even West Point really think I’d never heard of them? and c) there were schools I got several mailings from.
I’m not hostile about the junk mail, but it was overwhelming, and made an overwhelming time of life even more overwhelming. I even wrote an article for the school paper about it…maybe I should dig that up. I remember getting postcards that didn’t even have a school’s name on them–they just said things like “Think”. 
I’m sure there was a follow-up flyer later on, and it might have been a cool effect by itself, but it was lost in the avalanche.
Of course, this was before e-mail was big. Perhaps they just spam you these days…but I don’t think that would be any better, except, perhaps, for the forests.
Another perk to being a NMS for my husband (although I’m not sure that this even exists anymore at the U of MN, thanks to budget cuts) is that there was a special student group set up for the National Merit Scholars, the Presidential Scholars, and the Outstanding Minority Scholars (the three University-wide scholarships). If you received one of these scholarships, you were automatically a member. We had a full-time faculty advisor (during my freshman year, at least) and we had all kinds of events, as well as academic retreats (you’d go to a camp for the weekend and go in-depth into a topic, with guest speakers, etc.) and community service projects. I met so many good friends through that group (including the aforementioned spousal unit.) It’s where I discovered anime, too. As I said, I don’t know if other schools do this, or even if our school does it anymore, but this was a great program and show of support worth, to us, at least as much as the scholarship money. You might want to see if any prospective schools have a similar program.
Oh, and my husband corrected me. He got $2000/year. Isn’t he special? 
God, we’re a bunch of nerds!
Speak for yourself toadspittle… maybe the rest of you National Merit Scholars were nerds, but I was in the Chess Club