Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Education Notebook: Two seniors have one more application to fill out
Click the button above to see all of our community coverage, or go straight to your community's homepage with the menu below.
More education stories
- Boones Mill Elementary program lets kids pick their pace
- Technology resource teacher called 'a gift'
- Workshop hammers home some lessons
- Students attend green summit
- Glenvar High School: Volunteers show they care
Archive
Two Roanoke students have been invited to apply to the Presidential Scholars Program, a prestigious program for high school seniors run by the U.S. Department of Education.
Ben Mullet and Emily Thisdell, both students at Patrick Henry High School, are among about 80 Virginia high school students and about 3,000 students nationwide selected as candidates out of 2.8 million high school seniors in the country. Candidates are invited based on their standardized test scores. About 140 students will be chosen for the program.
Most of the commonwealth's candidates attend high schools in Northern Virginia. Mullet and Thisdell are the only two from Southwest Virginia to be recognized.
"We were notified in the mail," said Mullet. "I was definitely pretty excited. It's a big honor."
Students selected for the 45-year-old program will visit Washington for a week in June to meet politicians, government officials, artists, "and other accomplished people," according to a release from the Department of Education. They will visit museums, attend recitals and take part in a White House ceremony.
Each student may also invite a teacher along. Mullet said he had yet to bring this up with his teachers.
Thisdell said she hadn't expected an invitation to apply for the program.
"I had never heard about it before, and then I looked into it some," she said. "It sounds like it's a really big honor to get chosen for it."
Although they are officially Patrick Henry students, both Mullet and Thisdell spend most of their days in special programs for advanced students, at Governor's School in the mornings and CITY School in the afternoons. Both recently completed their college applications. Thisdell said she applied to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, James Madison University, the University of Virginia, the College of William and Mary and Duke University. She has already been accepted at UNC and James Madison.
Mullet was a little more coy when asked about the schools on his list, but he did allow that he has also been accepted at UNC.
Now that they've been chosen as Presidential Scholars candidates, they find themselves with one more application to fill out -- and more essays to write by the end of the month.
"One long essay and four half-page essays," Thisdell said. "It will be some work but it will be OK."
