Three BSSCA Students Receive Posse Scholarships

Written by Ms. Mirna Palacios, 12th Grade Connector, Bright Star Secondary Charter Academy

Posse is a college access and youth leadership development program that identifies, recruits and selects student leaders from public high schools and sends them in groups called Posses to some of the top colleges and universities across the country. A “Posse” is a multicultural team made up of 10 students. It acts as a support system to ensure that each scholar succeeds and graduates from college. Posse Scholars receive four-year, full-tuition leadership scholarships from Posse partner colleges and universities.

This year for the Posse scholarship over 1,000 students were nominated and interviewed in groups. From this level, around 100 students were selected to advance to the second round of interviews. All students that made the second round were asked to attend a large recruitment meeting. After the large group interview, only  half were called back as semi-finalists. Each semi-finalist went to the Posse office to have a direct  interview with the Posse staff. Between 20 and 25 of these students were chosen as finalists for each partner school. Finalists must agree to accept the Posse Scholarship if it is offered to them. In mid-December they participated in a group interview with all other finalists for their partner school. An admissions committee from the college, including the Dean of Admissions, attended this meeting. Finalists were notified that they received the Posse Scholarship in late December and began Posse’s eight-month pre-collegiate training program in January.  

“The final interview was the hardest part of the process because I had to quickly open up and give complete strangers a glimpse of who I really was,” said Christian Montes, 2016 Posse Scholarship recipient. He will be attending Northwestern University and is one of three BSSCA Posse Scholars this year. Carlos Cruz will be attending Hobart and William Smith Colleges and Tamar Rivera accepted her scholarship to Pepperdine University. We had a fourth finalist, Joseph Castro, who decided to decline an offer to Middlebury College because they do not have engineering, his major of choice.  

When applying and going through with the Posse Scholarship, organization is key. During the process I was able to help all four applicants with the gathering of their documents, editing of essays, and with mock interviews to prepare for the various levels of selection. In reality, however, these are great kids that could have done it all on their own if they had to. They are rock stars and Posse is lucky to have them!  

With the addition of these three, Bright Star Secondary Charter Academy now has four Posse scholars in colleges across the country! We look forward to continuing to connect our Bright Stars with the Posse Scholarship and other great opportunities like it.

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