Flinn Scholars

Shantanu Bala, a Class of 2011 Flinn Scholar and Arizona State University student, has been awarded the prestigious Thiel Fellowship that will match him with the world’s brightest young entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley leaders for the next two years.

Flinn Scholars

The 2014 Flinn Scholarship has been awarded to 20 of Arizona’s highest-achieving high-school seniors, who will receive a comprehensive educational package to attend an Arizona public university.

Flinn Scholars

Seventeen Flinn Scholars graduating this year from the three Arizona state universities were honored during the annual Recognition Dinner May 3.

Flinn Scholars

At the annual Recognition Dinner May 3, the Flinn Scholars Program and its Class of 2014 honored the educators who played an extraordinary role in the lives of the high-school seniors awarded the scholarship this year.

Flinn Scholars

The 2014 Flinn Scholarship has been awarded to 20 of Arizona’s highest-achieving high-school seniors, who will receive a comprehensive educational package to attend an Arizona public university.

Flinn Scholars

Big changes are coming to the SAT in spring 2016.

The longstanding penalty for guessing wrong will disappear, just like obscure vocabulary words. The essay will be optional. And the scoring will return to a 1,600-point scale. In addition to the test changes, a new program will give low-income students fee waivers to allow them to apply to four colleges at no charge.

The new exam will be introduced in spring 2016.

Here are the changes, as presented by the New York Times:

• Instead of arcane “SAT words” (“depreciatory,” “membranous”), the vocabulary definitions on the new exam will be those of words commonly used in college courses, such as “synthesis” and “empirical.”
• The essay, required since 2005, will become optional. Those who choose to write an essay will be asked to read a passage and analyze the ways its author used evidence, reasoning and stylistic elements to build an argument.
• The guessing penalty, in which points are deducted for incorrect answers, will be eliminated.
• The overall scoring will return to the old 1,600-point scale, based on a top score of 800 in reading and math. The essay will have a separate score.
• Math questions will focus on three areas: linear equations; complex equations or functions; and ratios, percentages and proportional reasoning. Calculators will be permitted on only part of the math section.
• Every exam will include, in the reading and writing section, source documents from a broad range of disciplines, including science and social studies, and on some questions, students will be asked to select the quotation from the text that supports the answer they have chosen.
• Every exam will include a reading passage either from one of the nation’s “founding documents,” such as the Declaration of Independence or the Bill of Rights, or from one of the important discussions of such texts, such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”

Read More: A new SAT aims to realign with schoolwork

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The Flinn Foundation’s “Action and Impact” report presents the organization’s current grantmaking priorities and activities that are making an impact across Arizona through the biosciences, civic leadership, arts and culture, and the Flinn Scholars program.

Flinn Scholars

Three Flinn Scholars have been named University of Arizona Pillars of Excellence, the highest honor for a student bestowed upon by the university.

Congratulations to Scholars Leah Edwards (’10), Daniel Fried (’10), and Paul Thomson (’11), three of the 12 students and alumni honored for their academic achievements during a ceremony on February 13. Eight faculty members were also honored.

Edwards is a Flinn and Udall Scholar who will be graduating with a double major in political science and environmental and water resources.

Fried is a Flinn, Goldwater and Churchill Scholar majoring in computer science, mathematics and information science.

Thomson is a Flinn Scholar studying acting and Africana studies.

Read More: UA Honors 'Pillars' of Research, Teaching, Engagement

Flinn Scholars

The application window for the 2014 Flinn Scholarship has closed.

All applicants for the scholarship will receive a status notification via email in mid-December. Interviews for approximately 75 semifinalists will take place Friday, January 10 and Saturday, January 11. Interviews for approximately 40 finalists will take place Friday, February 28, and Saturday, March 1.

Flinn Scholars

A few weeks ago, one of the applicants for the 2014 Flinn Scholarship wrote me and asked a simple question: "Is it okay to be creative when I answer the essay prompts?"

Below is my response. There's no reason it shouldn't be available to anyone who's working on the Flinn Scholarship application:

You're absolutely on the right track with the essays, in this sense: There are straightforward, fairly easy ways to answer any of the three questions, and sometimes we've been rather prescriptive in terms of what we're expecting an essay to address.

We will probably receive 400 sets of essays that take those straightforward approaches, even with the "commencement address" prompt. The better among these essays will demonstrate that the writer has thought about the prompts and answered the questions they explicitly contain; these will be unremarkable essays that don't hurt the rest of the writer's application. The less-distinguished among these essays will be confusing, rushed, ungrammatical, and/or inauthentic. These essays will make it almost impossible to advance the writer's application into the second round of our review process.

So, you should most definitely find *some* way to make your essays creatively distinctive. Certainly, there is opportunity to do that with the "commencement address" prompt; much will change in the world in 40 years; you will change, too. We will get *lots* of essays written from the perspectives of politicians and doctors and entrepreneurs. Probably quite a bit fewer written from the perspectives of parents, community activists, classroom teachers, artists, ex-cons, professional magicians, or victims of terrorism, shark attacks, or Martian abductions. There's so much you can do.

There is room for the other two prompts to yield creative responses as well. For the "compromise" prompt, I hope that we'll receive essays that talk about group dynamics in school settings, in extracurricular activities like marching band and athletics, in religious organizations, in local politics, in junior-high student council, and on and on. I hope that some of the essays will reveal the writers' senses of humor, or emotional depth, or courage, or sense of personal moral strength. I hope some will be written in the third person. I hope they'll all take the question seriously.

For the challenge question, I know we'll get lots of responses about education, immigration, divisiveness in politics, health care, and economic development--as we should. Those are essential issues confronting our state. I really hope we'll also get responses about less well-known issues about which the writer really knows something important, issues in which the writer has a meaningful stake but about which the writer can still think and argue dispassionately. 

Hope that helps.