Apply – The Blount Scholars Program

2024 Application

Welcome to the Blount (pronounced blənt) Scholars Program Online Application. Although this will easily be the most fun you will have in connection with your college search, you may want to give the application the once over before starting. This will enable you to save your responses in advance in a word processing program, which is always a good idea with web submissions. Not trying to get all in your business, or anything. Just making an observation....

Once you've entered your responses, replete with machine-tooled witticisms, in the form, you must remember to hit the "Submit My Completed Application" button at the end to finalize things. Partial applications will not be saved.
Ok, so the application has three sections:
- Section One - Pedestrian but nonetheless necessary biographical data--name, contact information, GPA & test scores, etc.
- Section Two - In which we try to get to know the person behind the myth. This might include: querying you about your preferences, passions, prejudices, and peeves; asking you to inhabit hypothetical scenarios or imaginary worlds; having you write a little poem; requiring you to translate a prose passage from Susquehannock into Urdu.
  
  Ok, the thing about the translation was a gag. We do ask you to solve some differential equations, though.
  Ok, the differential equations bit was a gag too. Loosen up, will you?
- Section Three - Wherein we wax curious about how Blount might fulfill your educational quest and how you see yourself fitting into the program.
Now get busy. And remember: if you're not having fun doing this application, you're living wrong.
Section One
Just the facts.
Name*
First Name Last Name
Preferred Name*
Email (NB: if your email account filters the mail you receive, you'll want to add blountscholars@ua.edu and bsp@ua.edu to your approved senders list.)*
Enter Email Confirm Email
UA email*
Enter Email Confirm Email
Permanent Address*
Street Address City State / Province / Region ZIP Country
Phone*
CWID (if issued)
Areas of Current Academic Interest*
GPA*
Current High School*
SAT EBRW (if taken)
SAT Math (if taken)
ACT Composite (if taken)
Reference's Name (Please select someone who knows you in an academic capacity. N.B.: we are not soliciting a letter of recommendation, simply the contact information of a reference in the event we feel we need additional information.)*
First Last
Reference's Position/Title*
Reference's Email
Enter Email Confirm Email
Residence in the Blount Living/Learning Center during the first year is required. Please indicate your assent below.*
- I understand the Blount residency requirement and am willing--indeed, am eager--to live in the Blount Living/Learning Center.
Section Two
♫ Getting to know you, getting to know all about you...♫
Please run with the following prompts. How long should responses be? Totally up to you--there's no minimum or maximum length.
The Japanese verse form known as Haiku traditionally uses linked images to connect an experience of nature to the human condition. Although the form has evolved historically, one common haiku configuration consists of 17 on (aka morae, which for the purposes of English translation are often loosely rendered as syllables) arranged in three lines. The lines contain 5, 7, and 5 syllables respectively. Below is an example. Replace it with a haiku of your own. Note: The concept of nature here is capacious—applicants from the Bronx may well have a different sense of nature than applicants from Boise. Then, too, the word “nature” has other meanings than simply “the woods”.*
Whenever you crush A Paper Cup it holds less But how can this be?
New technologies perennially occasion both optimism and anxiety on the part of their human developers. Although the idea of artificial intelligence has speculative precursors extending back to antiquity, the coining of the term in the mid 1950s and the emergence of the field of research attached to it has produced spirited rumination about its impact on humanity. Pick some issue or arena that AI potentially affects and tell us whether we should be optimistic, anxious, or both about its advent. (And why.)*
As Jay-Z once observed, "If the beat is time, flow is what we do with that time, how we live through it. The beat is everywhere, but every life has to find its own flow." We're interested in what music has helped you find your flow. In the box below, create a playlist of 5. On the first line of each entry, list the song title and artist. On a second line, provide some brief observations about why the tune is important to you--what intrigues you about it, how it has impacted you, what place it occupies in your listening practice, etc. Use the formatting tool to bold your titles; separate entries with a blank line. We've provided a sample playlist (with some really superb tunes) below; delete it and replace it with your own favorites.*
You Be Illin' - Run DMC You may not necessarily be what you eat, but you are certainly what you listen to. The Wolverine - John Phillip Souza Learning the tuba part for this in marching band persuaded me of both the genius of march time and the beauty of nature's noblest predator. It also convinced me to switch to the piccolo, which is far lighter than the tuba. Cheese Cake Truck - King Missile A cautionary tale about loving your job too much. Wife and Mother - Lord Kitchener A fearless take on making the hard choices. Queen of the Night's Aria, The Magic Flute - Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart High note heaven. How does she do that? Police Dog Blues - Blind Blake On the wisdom of cutting your losses.
A number of modern social theorists have maintained that there is not a singular "American" experience, but rather that a variety of different demographic variables--from socio-economic class to race and ethnicity to sexual orientation and gender identity to age to where you live to....(you get the idea)--condition how you experience America. From your perspective, how is the America you live in the same, different, or some of both with respect to the America that is portrayed in popular TV shows, in movies, or even on the news? International students are at liberty to substitute their home country in this rumination on national identity.*
In his novel Auto-da-Fé, Elias Canetti ruminates “But what proof have we that inorganic objects can feel no pain? Who knows if a book may not yearn for other books, its companions of many years, in some way strange to us and therefore never yet perceived?” Give Canetti’s thought experiment the provisional credence it deserves. Tell us about two books you have read that could conceivably yearn for one another. What is the basis of their yearning? What induces their desire for companionship? (NB: Your choices needn't be novels or even fiction; any book is fair game.)*
Take a blank piece of paper (8.5 x 11) and make your mark upon it, so to speak. You may write, tear, draw, color, fold--anything you like except a photo collage (which doesn't rule out either photography or collages). When you're done, scan it and upload. Alternately, of course, you can create a digital file from the outset and just upload it. It must be in one of the following formats, though: .jpg, .jpeg, .gif, .png, .pdf, .doc, .docx, .txt.*
Accepted file types: jpg, jpeg, gif, png, pdf, doc, docx, txt, Max. file size: 5 MB.
Are you a smoker?*
- Yes
- No
Gentle applicant, you shouldn't smoke. It's unhealthy. And besides, the dorm, indeed the whole UA campus, is a non-smoking area. Promise you'll give it up. (Note: agreeing or refusing to give up smoking will not affect your admissions decision.)*
- I promise to quit smoking.
- Negative. I'm not promising. It's none of your business and I resent the institutional paternalism that has produced this question.
Excellent. Don't start. It's not good for you.
Section Three
The Fit
How did you first learn of the Blount Scholars Program?*
What aspect(s) of the Blount Program induced you to apply?*
Far from operating on a merchant/consumer model, The Blount Scholars Program is a partnership between faculty and students. Blounters, as students in the program are called, are legendarily intrepid in helping to shape their academic and social lives. Which of the Blount groups below could you imagine yourself participating in?
- HOP - House of the People (student governance)
- Ambassadors (student recruitment)
- Mentors (new student orientation and transition to UA)
- Social Committee (Fun--note capital "F")
- Media Committee (print publications, website, social media)
- Blount Instruments (music, aka the food of love)
- Poetry Collective ("the art of substantiating shadows")
- Trivium et Quadrivium (trivia team)
- Blount Cineastes (film group--turtleneck sweater required)
- Roll Tile (mah jongg club)
- The Blount Truth (literary magazine)
- Check Please! (chess club)
- BFF's (Blount Fibre Fiends: fiber arts collective)
Now name an activity that isn't in the list above that you could imagine initiating.*
Guess which question was written by ChatGPT.*
- America in the Media
- AI
- Yearning Books
Get Owned! Trick question. A genuine human wrote all the questions. The AIs just decide whether you're admitted.
Ok, so what did we miss? If there are additional documents (tax returns, dental X-rays, talley sheet from that time you bowled 285, etc.) that you would like to include in your application, please upload them here. (Optional)
Drop files here or

Accepted file types: jpg, gif, png, pdf, mov, doc, docx, txt, Max. file size: 5 MB, Max. files: 2.
reCAPTCHA
Almost done! Simply check the reCAPTCHA box above and hit the submit button below to complete your application. Otherwise, you will have to fill out the entire thing again.
And here, of course, AI anxieties arise yet again. "How can a program committed to diversity and social justice discriminate against robots?”, you ask? Actually, we don't. The reCAPTCHA is just for the bad robots: corporate spyware, denial of service attacks by competitor universities, foreign governments trying to tamper with Blount's application process. But benign, curious robots that are clever enough to pass the Turing test are welcome in the program.
How good would a bot have to be in order to fool us, i.e., to be as good as one of our flesh-and-blood applicants?
Insanely good.
Comments
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2024 Application

Section One

Section Two

Section Three