Thank you for offering your time to help select 30 or so 2026 MDI Future of Eastern Maine Aspirations Scholarship recipients. We have 93 applications. The ones I have looked at are very good, as I expected. MDI does a very good job with these. It is always hard to select just a few.

This is not a writing contest. We do like great writing, but mostly we are focused on effort. That means that any student could earn this scholarship, regardless of their past academic achievement. We are likely to select some high achieving students who work hard at everything. We also always feel good when we award a scholarship to a student who might have extra challnges in his or her life but seems to have worked very hard on this essay.

We have divided the 93 applications into five groups. I will assemble the groups over the next few days. I hope you will communicate with other members of your group and as a group recommend five students you feel are especially deserving of a scholarship, with as many as five others you think deserve additional discussion by the whole group. We will then meet in Bar Harbor on April 14 for all those who can make it to select the 30 or so recipients.

I encourage you to read the application requirements and the prompts. And, the Expectations Checklist. You may also want to read the 12 Tips I give them.

We define college very broadly, so most any program after high school works for this scholarship. They do need submit a complete application and we do ask them to have their application be error-free. Everyone needs to rate their effort in school and on the application, and the teacher needs to do the same. We do ask for comments from a parent or other adult mentor. This gets complicated. There may be some strong applications with no parent/mentor comment. That may be because the student didn’t get the job done, or it may be because the student doesn’t have support at home. It can be hard to remove them from our list of recipients because of unsupportive parents, on the other hand, they did have the option to get some other adult mentor to write something. That could be an adult at school.

Also below is a link to a scoresheet you can use if you wish. It is hard to score the first few when you have nothing to compare them to. I suggest you read several before scoring any. Generally, we score them as follows: 1 = Weak and not worthy of a scholarship; 2 = Solid and maybe worthy, but not sure; 3 = Very strong and definitely worthy of a scholarship. I and others always have many 2+ and 3- scores when we can’t quite decide.

Let me know if youy have any questions.

Bob Stuart
bstuart@mainecollegecircle.org
207-318-5400

They may take a while to load since they are large files.

Link to:
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Group 4
Group 5

12 Tips
You can use this scoresheet or not. Score sheet