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On a general note, how often/likely is it that the school will award a merit based scholarship after your 1L? I've heard of people leveraging a possible transfer to obtain more money. Successful/Possible?

dhl321 wrote:On a general note, how often/likely is it that the school will award a merit based scholarship after your 1L? I've heard of people leveraging a possible transfer to obtain more money. Successful/Possible?

Definitely possible, many schools have scholarships that are awarded at then end of the first and second year. The scholarships themselves are only given to a few students though, so the chances of getting one later is quite small.

gunners, come out from your hiding!

Are these usually formal/established scholarships that are announced in advance? Or are they offered on an ad hoc basis?

anyone?

It depends on the school, ask and Im sure they will tell you what the options are. For example Catholic University awards scholarships to anyone in the top 25 percent of the class, and the requirement for keeping the scholarship is staying there. I know another school (U.Baltimore) that will give scholarships to most of the top 10% if you don't already have one. You can also use the transfer threat, if you're a top 10% student and there's a threat of you transferring schools will probably try to keep you there...

It would seem that leveraging a transfer would be one of the few ways to go about this. Why else would they be motivated to turn down thousands of dollars from you?

I am currently in the process of trying to get more scholarship money, and will be (hopefully) using a potential transfer as leverage. I will let everyone know how it goes.

My question is how do you go about this. I don't want to have to go through the whole song and dance of the transfer application (because I don't actually want to transfer and would rather not give my professors that impression either). Should I wait until I get my second semester grades, or does the process begin before that? Right now I have a 4.07 GPA at a 15-20 range school, any ideas as to how I should approach the question, who to talk to etc.?