On Tuesday afternoon, a mass email was sent to all junior students and their parents from the Columbus East Counseling Department and detailed a deadline change for the Lilly Endowment Community Scholarship. The application, previously due in December, will now need to be submitted by Friday, September 2, 2016. The change will be executed this upcoming school year, therefore affecting current juniors.

The Lilly Scholarship, made possible by The Heritage Fund, provides a four-year, full-tuition scholarship to any Indiana university, and is awarded yearly to two Bartholomew County seniors. The announcement of winners, previously made in early April, will also shift to December.

According to the email, the change was made in part so that winning seniors will have more time to apply and commit to a university. Formerly, the winners were announced far too late for students to apply to prospective colleges and were limited to those that they have already been accepted to. For example, a student may have refrained from applying to private universities due to cost concerns, but if they had ended up being a Lilly recipient, the application deadline would have passed. Now, there is still time for seniors to consider all options.

“Previously, by the time of [the announcement], you may already know where you want to go to school. But now if you were a recipient of a Lilly Scholarship, you would be able to use that in your decision making process,” said Columbus East College and Scholarship Coordinator Allison Clark.

Another cited reason is to comply with changes made in the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA).

Since the Lilly Scholarship application is due after just a month back in school, juniors are urged to start obtaining letters of recommendation from current teachers and become satisfied with SAT/ACT test scores. A further obstacle presented is the absence of first senior semester grades and senior projects to boost applications.

“A lot of students use senior project information in their interview and on their application, and they’re just not going to be as far along on their project,” Clark said.
Though the information released by the Heritage Fund can sound daunting at first, time spend working on the application over the summer will pay off to two Bartholomew County seniors.