APIASF

A few weeks ago, I took advantage of doing the scholarship readings for the APIASF (Asian and Pacific Islander American Scholarship Fund). I found the experience to be very interesting as a whole. Most of the student applications that I read stunned me with the amount of extracurricular activities these students were performing while obtaining high grade point averages. Some students were doing really high level activities, such as working on robotics, in the health care field, or making web pages for large companies or the government. I couldn't even imagine doing things like that while I was in high school.

There were a few times that I felt as though the students could have used some help to tweak their answers though. The method of scoring the questions involved a lot of reading into what hardships they have faced and how they planned to bring their goals back to helping the community. Unfortunately the essay questions themselves were split into 3 questions: "What are your goals?" "How will you serve the community?" and "What hardships have you faced?" I feel as though it would be better if they had the students write a single long essay that asks them to hit on all three of those instead of three small essays, that is still being scored on how well they hit on all three of those, but only asks for one at a time.

I also found that a lot of students didn't really pick a great person to write a letter of recommendation. For the most part, the letters I read consisted of "X is a great student, they always do their work on time and get good grades." While that is useful information, it didn't really show any connection to the student, and made it impossible for the letter to link in with what it was being scored on, such as showing why the student/community would benefit from the scholarship going to that student.

As a side oddity, the vast, vast majority of the applications I ended up reading were from females.