Your support has paid off! Our Heinz Commercial "Heinz Ketchup Watching, Share the Love" was selected as a Semi-Finalist in this years competition!

From over 2500 entries, we are Top 10!
Top 5 get shown on TV, the winner gets $57,000.

So, now is the time for action! Go to www.topthistv.com/vote.aspx and vote for our commercial! Vote often and early!  Go nuts!

(you can see part of me briefly in the quick shot of the group of people looking for ketchup in the grass.  i'm wearing a turquoise shirt and tan pants)

Thank you in advance!!!!

I'm also concerned that there may be some serious re-writes ahead, but that is okay. I'll have some good feedback before I take another look, and in the meantime, I can work on the sequel, already about 25% in first draft.  I am doing more writing than I have in most of my life, now that I have two of my own blogs and one for my job. Research takes time, but it pays off in more ideas and more resources.  Any by the time Maven is in print, I'll have the platform up and going for her to stand on. 

The comments so far indicate that Maven is not far enough from the stereotype of fairy godmothers in Disney movies to be interesting. I may reevaluate that, especially in the first 50 pages of the book, which is all that is presented at Amazon.  If an editor reads that far into a book, then the writer has a good shot. From my own experience, I won't read that much of a book expecting it to get better, and the few that I have read because it was required, never got better, and some that stated out with promise never delivered. So I am very glad to get this kind of feedback.

 The semi-finalists collect votes, and from there the finalists are chosen. The final winner will get a publication contract, and the 9-runners up will be able to publish through Booksurge, the Amazon Print on Demand service. 

The writers group that published Port Nowhere used Booksurge, back before Amazon bought them, and they do good work. Their templates are easy to use so that you can make a decent looking book with in a reasonable amount of time, although it helps to have a deep knowledge of some of Word's advanced features.  

 I also have some other stories, though not about Maven, at my website http://charlottebabb.com , These are the stories from Port Nowhere, and are not fantasy but space opera. They were a lot of fun to do, and I hope sometime to revise the proprietary bits out and republish them in a new setting. Now to spam all my friends and get out the votes.  This is one candidate I am completely behind--unless that means I am beside myself!

So, it may seem as though December was a month of abandonment for our dear AdmitSpit site, but I assure you it is temporary! Vacation's over for us, so it's back to responding to questions and dishing out college admissions talk as usual.

Edie commented recently on the post titled, "National Merit Semifinalist essay," the following:

"I took the PSAT in early October and found out this week (January 4th) that I am a semifinalist. I have two concerns.

1) When I got my PSAT scores from my guidance counselor, he said that there was a possibility that I might have to take the SAT as part of the process. I got a 2310 on the real SAT in December (with which I was satisfied) and, quite honestly, I don’t want to take it again. Since I took it two months after the PSAT, do you think I will have to take it again?
2.) My GPA is around a 3.6/3.7 on an unweighted scale of 4.0. I took really challenging classes, but do you think this will eliminate me?"

So, response to question one is 2310 is a fine score and I don't know what your guidance counselor is talking about because no, you shouldn't have to retake the SAT exam again. Especially not if you're satisfied with the score.

To question two, I think your GPA is probably okay, especially since National Merit committee will be seeing your whole transcript. The whole reason why they want the school to send in the transcripts to help them with their decision is because they want to make sure the people they choose as finalists are indeed great students and that it wasn't just an anomaly that they happened to get a high PSAT score to qualify them. I think a 3.7 or 3.8 GPA will demonstrate to them enough that you are a smart kid and you genuinely deserve a spot in the finalist position and that it was not a fluke that you scored well on the PSAT.

Plus, is this your unweighted GPA or a weighted one? If you're telling us an unweighted GPA then your weighted one should be higher if you took challenging classes, so I really wouldn't worry; I think you're well positioned for being a finalist. Write a thoughtful, unique essay, and you should be gold.

... are indeed done by state!

Therefore, the score cutoff in California may be different from the cutoff in New York or Nebraska or Arizona for the National Merit semi-finalist round.

Remember, the College Board needs to take about 16,000 students of the 1.4 million who take the PSAT/NMSQT exam. And, according to the College Board website, "to ensure that academicaly able young people from all parts of the United States are included in this talent pool, semi-finalists are designated on a state representational basis. They are the highest scoring entrants in each state."

When you go about preparing for the National Merit/PSAT exam, prepare for it as if it were the real SAT! I cannot stress enough how often students make the mistake of blowing off this test just because it's the "pre-SAT." The test is usually administered in mid-October, so there's still time to prepare folks! (I'll follow up in the next few blog posts with more about what/how you should prepare.)

It is indeed a great honor to be a National Merit finalist; only 15,000 students out of the over 1.4 million nationwide who took the test will become finalists.

Also, remember that this is a relatively lengthy process. You take the test your junior year usually, but you don't find out about becoming a semi-finalist until fall of senior year (at least that's how it was at my school), and then finalist standing is awarded mid-senior year.

As I may or may not have said already, I was indeed a National Merit Finalist, but before becoming a finalist, you must get to the semi-finalist level by qualifying through your PSAT/NMSQT score.

Once you get to the semi-finalist round, there's a pretty decent application process to go through in order to be selected as a finalist.

First, you'll submit your grades to the College Board. (They want to make sure that you didn't just get to the semi-finalist round by accident or random stroke of luck on the PSAT/NMSQT, and that you actually have some smarts to back up your high scores.)

Then, they ask you to list your extracurriculars as well as honors and recognitions. (Sometimes these may seem pretty similar, but I always considered awards and prizes to be honors and recognitions whereas extracurricular activities would be the clubs or organizations you participate in. There may be some overlap between the two categories occasionally. Maybe they changed the forms within the past few years, but when I filled it out I found that there was very little space, so plan out what you're writing before! Be concise, and figure out if it will be better to type it or write it out by hand.)

Finally, there's the essay. (I didn't find it too daunting myself. Some people I know decided to focus on one particular aspect of their lives or one specific activity that had a large affect on their lives. This works just as well as what I did, which was write more generally on several aspects of my life and a few activities that were important to me. Remember you're limited by space, and you don't want to have a dry, boring essay, so try to at least give it a creative aspect, whether that comes through in the tone of the writing, the intro and conclusion, or the content itself.)

Also, the College Board, as usual, can be confusing with deadlines and requirements, so make sure you understand exactly what you need to do with the form. I remember that our school's counselors stressed that they would give you only one copy, so don't mess it up!

When you get your PSAT/NMSQT scores back, don't get confused as to why you don't have even close to a 2400. The PSAT is scored on a 240 point scale. (They recommend adding a zero onto the end of your scores for an idea of how you'd do on the real SAT.)

Out of the nearly 1.3 million people who take the PSAT/NMSQT test, how do they choose who's a semi-finalist?

They add up your scores on each of the three sections of the exam (reading, math, and writing), and call this your "Selection Index." Then, they designate a Selection Index cutoff. (Obviously, the highest Selection Index possible is 240, but the cutoff is usually somewhere between 214 and 220, depending on the year.)

So, the students who score at, or above, the cutoff Selection Index number make it to the semi-finalist round. It's usually around 50,000 people.

There was a time when the PSAT was just considered a pre-SAT; but nowadays, you need to pay attention to the full name of this test... PSAT/NMSQT.

What is this acronym gibberish? The PSAT part is still the pre-SAT part (to help you prepare for the real thing), but the NMSQT part is now becoming more and more important (National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test).

Do not just show up to the test thinking that it doesn't matter for anything! True, colleges won't see your score on this exam, but it is extremely invaluable to list as one of your awards or honors that you were a National Merit semi-finalist or finalist.

Make those 2-ish hours worth your while... this test is by far easier than the real SAT and much shorter. Aim for getting in the top percentiles so that you can snag the National Merit titles. Plus, if you do really well, you might get some money, who knows?