[Editor's Note: Here at WCI we are pleased to announce our grand prize winner of the 2016 WCI Scholarship, Joshua Fullmer, an OMS3 at the Campbell University School of Osteopathic Medicine. Grand prize this year is good for 60% of the cash raised for the scholarship, or about $15,600. While this was only the favorite essay for one of the twelve judges (as well as most of the WCI staff), it was the second favorite essay of the ten finalists for fully half of the judges and ended up winning the contest by a mile. We liked this essay because not only did it tell us what the money was going to be used for, but because it reminds all of us that money is to be spent for those things in life that bring us the most happiness, not just squirrelled away for no eventual purpose. Enjoy! Thank you to all who participated this year- sponsors, readers, applicants, judges, and especially the wonderful people helping me here at WCI as we work hard to help those who wear the white coat get a “fair shake” on Wall Street. Congratulations to Joshua and his little family.]
Who am I to give investment advice? The only stock I have ever owned was virtual (and to be honest, I lost most of that). My portfolio is as blank as my stare when, two years after biochemistry, I am asked to recite the steps of the TCA cycle. At this point you may already be asking, “Why am I still reading this?” or “There must be a typo because he put the word investment in the title.” It is true, this essay will provide little benefit if looking for financial guidance. Rather, I would like to demonstrate that investments come in many forms.
“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest” – Benjamin Franklin
I am not one of those people who grew up knowing I wanted to be a doctor. I never dressed up as a doctor for Halloween, or enjoyed the game of operation. Quite frankly, it wasn’t until my junior year at the University of Utah that it surpassed physical therapy as my career of choice. The decision was not based on money. It was not based on helping people (seeing as that is part of a PT’s job as well). It was based on investing in myself, my education, to a point where I knew I would have no regrets wondering whether or not I challenged myself completely. This may sound selfish, but investments that push us to grow are what make us better, stronger people. As our deposits increase, the interest of personal growth also extends to those around us. If we do not value ourselves highly enough to see ourselves worth the investment, happiness will be hard to come by.
“In investing, what is comfortable is rarely profitable” – Robert Arnott
There is nothing on this earth that could be a better support on this journey than my sweet wife. She has been willing to sacrifice so much to invest in me, and in our family. Even though there is nothing she enjoys more than being close to family, she agreed to move across the country to North Carolina. Even though she works so hard as a second grade teacher, she does not complain when my tuition bill comes in the mail higher than her annual salary. Even when I am spending late hours with physicians, out of town at conferences, making her go to bed alone because I am up studying, she is lovingly supporting and encouraging me. Her confidence in me makes all the difference. So… we continue to FaceTime loved ones on holidays, clip coupons, and make the most of the time we have together. Although life is not always comfortable, especially for her, we are confident these experiences will be profitable.
“The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing” – Phillip Fisher
Platinum Level Scholarship Sponsor
Four years ago, my wife’s cousin was having trouble getting pregnant. She had one child and a long history of miscarriages. After extensive testing they discovered she had fragile X-associated ovarian insufficiency (FXPOI) at age 27, and was a carrier for fragile X. This led my sister-in-law to get tested as well, discovering she too was a carrier due to the X chromosome passed from her father. For those of you that aren’t aware, Fragile X syndrome is the most common cause of inherited intellectual disability. As it is passed from generation to generation the genetic trinucleotide repeat expands (known as anticipation), meaning the severity of the disease often increases when passed from mother to child. Knowing that my sister-in-law was a carrier, we knew before testing that my wife was as well.
From the very beginning, we have desired to have a big family. Occasionally my wife will apologize to me about being a Fragile X carrier. Every time she does it sends a pain through my heart. The sweetest woman I have ever met keeps carrying around some unnecessary guilt that we all know is unwarranted. While exploring our options we learned more about preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), which allows for genetic screening before implantation. This seemed like the perfect option for us, allowing us to ensure our child does not carry the disease. Unfortunately, PGD along with IVF would cost us somewhere in the range of $25,000. So, that led us to a decision. Do we wait until we are in a better financial position and risk early-menopausal symptoms like her cousin? Or do we go further in debt to start our family?
Platinum Level Scholarship Sponsor
We decided together that we value nothing more than the idea of a happy, healthy family. So, my wife’s teacher salary (which was already towered by student loan debt) and nearly our entire savings were invested into medical bills. We found some amazing doctors that we were confident in, but still had to face the fact that the average rate of live births per embryo transfer (without the added risks of PGD) hovered less than or around 50%. After a successful egg retrieval and genetic screening, we were ultimately left with only one shot at getting pregnant. After many prayers we discovered a small beating heart on ultrasound nearly eight weeks later. Never had I felt more excited or relieved. A few weeks later we were visiting family for Christmas out of state. My wife got very sick and began bleeding a lot. I will never forget the sound of her crying from the bathroom after she passed some clots, convinced we lost our sweet little angel. Holding my wife in my arms I remember feeling very fortunate for her, no matter how things turn out. Even if we lost all our savings and would be unable to afford trying again for a few years, we had each other. We went to the doctor, and to our astonishment we saw the same little heartbeat flickering. A large subchorionic hematoma had caused the bleeding, and we were told it should resolve on its own.
The conclusion to this story cannot yet be told because it has yet to be written. In two short months we are expecting the addition of our little miracle child. Holding her in my arms and looking into her bright eyes, will it be worth it? There is no doubt in my mind the answer is a resounding yes. There is no price too high to match the value of such a moment.
So who am I to give investment advice? I am a full-time medical student who spends hours upon hours studying so that I can someday help others. I am part of an amazing marriage that makes continual financial sacrifices to receive an amazing emotional return on investment. I am an expecting father who is already willing to give up all that I have to ensure a bright future for my daughter. Although I have not been able to make any major financial investments at this time, it is my hope to take any money I could potentially be awarded and use it as part of my ongoing investment into a better tomorrow for me and my family.
What do you think? In what ways do we make non-financial investments? When is it reasonable to go into debt to start a family? How has your family supported you in your career? Comment below!
I pray the rest of your pregnancy goes very well. Congratulations on the upcoming, long awaited baby! And of course congratulations in winning! It was a very touching essay to which I could relate on many counts.
Thank you very much. I’m shocked, especially with so many other great essays out there.
As an update, my wife delivered a beautiful healthy girl, who is now 2 months old.
I love this update and am so glad this essay won. Congrats to you and your family!
CONGRATULATIONS!!!
Congratulations dude! You just pumped up my spirits with your story.
This was a touching story (and congratulations on the baby girl!) and my favorite of those publicly shared. A lot of times we see the impact of money and can easily get the message that it’s all important. Not everything we want in life can be paid for with cash, sometimes there are other costs and it’s important to recognize this applies to both side of the earn and spend equation. It feels like you have the proper perspective on life already.
Only the favorite of 1 of the 12 judges?! Strange. This one stands out among the rest.
Congrats to you, Josh. Please share a baby picture.
I second Joseph’s request. Please post pictures of your sweet wife and your baby daughter!
Remember there were 10 finalist essays, and I assure you they were all very good. None of them got more than 2 or 3 “firsts” from the judges.
Josh, congratulations on making tough decisions.
Wow…I had a different reaction- I was hoping the scholarship winner would be an aspiring Albert Schweitzer. This fellow seems to care little about others, only his own genetic lineage. While I wish him luck, I’m not sure it’s a great example. Having children only benefits himself, not others. Why reward that?
Real classy response.
Glad mellowyellow brought this up, is there some implicit bias in the scholarship given that the last two years the winners were both male medical students whose wives either could not/should not have children and they needed the money to finance this? I still remember how offended I was at last year’s winner who proudly boasted that his wife was so strict with their budget that he was not even allowed to buy a candy bar from the hospital vending machine in the middle of the night but she was somehow able to come up with $6000 out of their budget for fertility treatments. With 7 billion people on Earth and a carrying capacity estimated at 10 billion, should fertility treatments even be a “thing”? Personally, I am happy for them, having a baby is a blast, I’ve had two myself and have greatly enjoyed molding them into good citizens, but in the bigger picture, I am not so sure I will be contributing to the scholarship fund next year since it seems to be a ticket to fulfilling one’s narcissistic need to reproduce. Helping relieve the loan burden of a doc from a disadvantaged background who plans to give back to her/his community would have better met my narcissistic need for feeling like my money went to a worthwhile cause.
Exactly!!
I had the opposite reaction and plan on contributing more next year. I am ok with the idea that some may disagree with this. My opinion is I don’t think there is anything more important for the world than an honest, caring, hard-working individuals… Like Josh and his wife, to raise posterity and teach and nurture them.
Not sure where the bias would reside, but the only possible locations would be in the selection by WCI staff members of those essays as finalists or in the selection of the winners by the judges themselves (none of whom are WCI staff members.)
Why not volunteer as a judge next year? I think there will be ample opportunities as we don’t plan to limit the number of submissions to just 100 next year, so there will probably be hundreds of applications to try to go through. How many would you like to wade through for us?
The judges disagreed with your assessment of who the scholarship winner should be. Their reasons are their own. I don’t require them to provide them. I’m sorry to hear you won’t be contributing next year. I hope you reconsider.
+1 to volunteering as a judge.
I think the essay was good, but not exactly what I would have expected to be a winning essay. I hadn’t read last year’s essay until now, but was also surprised to see that two years in a row, winners both wanted large families.
While you (Dr. Dahle) do not decide the winner (huge kudos to selecting judges), it does seem the judges have chosen winners that are tremendously similar to you – white, Mormon, male physicians who did their undergraduate studies in Utah wanting large families. It makes me wonder if there is an implicit bias in selecting judges. My guess is that is NOT the case, but rather fans of WCI may have an over-representation of white, male Mormons (studying medicine of course), and thus choosing judges may be a blind process, the laws of probability may lead to this skew.
The simple solution is to volunteer as a judge. “If you are not part of the solution…”
We’re leaning toward having a lot more judges next year (mostly in order to handle the anticipated 400-500 essays), which hopefully will give people more confidence in the process.
I’m not aware of the religion of any of the judges. About all I could tell was gender maybe country of origin, but that was purely from their names. I tried to make sure the gender was split about 50/50 and that we had plenty of representation from people who did not have European sounding names.
I’m tempted to send the 100+ essays to anyone who didn’t like the 10 we chose to send to the finalists. I bet your list would not be very different and that the 5 winners would almost surely be included in your top 10. Readers seemed to hate the “admissions-essay-like” applications from last year and that’s 80% of what we get.
This is insensitive. Since you didn’t go through any infertility struggles I can’t expect you would know the emotional torture, especially on the woman. If what you want is someone saying they are going to go back and help their community I expect that you’ll get a wave of essays to that effect every year. That an essay like this should win represents how diverse our backgrounds are in terms of suffering and pain. Someone doesn’t need to fit the mold of your “disadvantaged background” to show strength, determination, and love – all attributes worthy of a scholarship in my mind.
One of the most fun things about this contest is I tell people to write about anything they want, and they do!
This year I told them not to just send in their admissions essay. Hopefully that’ll help as we get a ton of those every year.
I like the “write about anything” concept. I just hope the responses to this year’s winning essays are a bit more professional and less heartless than some of the posts I’ve seen on past year’s winning essays, this one included. Great idea to do this.
[Deleted as it consists entirely of a personal attack. I don’t like the way this is headed.-ed]
[Personal attack deleted.-ed]
Why reward it? Dunno. Talk to the twelve judges (none of whom are me) who gave it more total points than any other essay. Apparently they were inspired by it and felt the writer deserved the award. Remember this panel of judges consisted of docs and other high income professionals, about half male and half female, with different heritages and backgrounds (at least judging by their names.)
I’m disappointed with your anonymous comment to someone whose identity is made public by this post. It’s very rude. A simple “Congratulations” and a private email to me would have been much more appropriate. I’m sure the money and the many replies to your comment will make it up to the winner however.
Awesome story… very well deserving. You are an example of a wonderful human being.
Great essay.
Children are the next generation. It certainly benefits society to ensure there is one (next generation) and of course raise them right so that they make a positive impact.
Having lost a child at 14-weeks and 19-years later, that loss still affects my wife, I can relate to the fear that his wife faced. We do have six living children, so we did not stop trying. :O) However, during the pregnancy of our sixth-born child, there were feared complications from a test that showed a possibility of Down’s Syndrome. We didn’t actually pray for her to not have Down’s, we prayed for the strength to face whatever may come. We did ask for mountains to be moved for verification and 3-D ultrasound and an amniocentesis demonstrated she did not have it.
I have gone into debt to create memories for our family. On one hand, I would rather not have the debt, but I do believe it was an investment into experiences and memories that will never be forgotten. Some of them involved a lot of hard work and dedication to certain amounts of training. It is very hard to put a price on learning lessons about the value of hard work and seeing something through, even when it is hard.
I think if the WCI wants to fund fertility treatments, he should say so and be honest. To each his (and it does seem to be his) own.
But to call it a scholarship when essentially it’s a fund for assisted reproduction, possibly focused on one particular demographic, is disingenuous to his donors. And I will not be one in future!
[Ad hominem comments deleted.-ed]
JZ, what exactly is your point? From WCI’s own Scholarship announcement regarding the purpose of this money: “it is a great way to directly impact the indebtedness issue that professional students are facing due to skyrocketing tuition.” For TWO years now, the scholarship (to which I have contributed) has gone to pay for one couple’s fertility treatments. Yes the story pulls at the heartstrings, yes the family needs the dough, but it feels a little inappropriate to award so much of all of those contributions to someone who was voluntarily choosing to genetically engineer an offspring. Having kids is not a necessity, it is a privilege, it is an adventure, it is a WANT, but it is NOT a NEED. Buying textbooks is a need, traveling to interviews is a need, paying back your student loans is a need. I’m sure mellowyellow does not hate children or the people who have them and neither do I. But consider what people hoped they were contributing to when they made a scholarship donation. At least the 2nd and 3rd place winners got a little bit of my contribution too. Perhaps next year there can be a more equitable five-way split between the winners to please all the donors.
[Personal attack deleted.-ed]
[Going down the same rabbit hole.-ed]
I don’t plan to have five first places next year. It kind of defeats the purpose of a competition. I suppose it was more equitable this year than last year, which was winner take all. I’m certainly open to suggestions.
You have several choices here. You can donate or not donate. You can volunteer to be a judge or you can not volunteer to be a judge. You can send me a private email with a suggestion or you can post anonymous, public criticism. (Well, it’s anonymous to others, but not to me.) It’s all voluntary.
Let me know if you want your money back too. I can at least verify you did make a significant donation, unlike the other two (although to be fair they may use a different email as their paypal address than the one they use for commenting.)
I would remind people like MellowYellow, “If you don’t like what charitable people do with their money, you can shove it because it’s their money. If you don’t like what charitable people do with YOUR money, you can shove it and take your money elsewhere. But NEVER do you gain the right to castigate the recipient for choosing to spend the money you voluntarily gave on what makes him happy.”
It really grinds my gears when a donor tosses some money your way, then you award it to Joshua, and yet the donor thinks that that gives them some say over how ALL of Joshua’s money gets spent. No, what *was* your dollar is now *his* dollar and indistinguishable from every other dollar in his bank account. Take your judgment and your money somewhere else. The nerve.
I’m not even sure WCI is one of the judges, but even if he were, there were 11 others. The group choose this as the winning essay.
You are of course free to choose what you support. I suspect others, if necessary, will fill in any missing gaps next year.
cd :O)
No, I wasn’t one of the judges. I wasn’t last year either.
I have no desire to fund fertility treatments per se. I do have a desire to increase financial literacy among medical and other professional students. I have a desire to directly reduce the indebtedness of as many professional students as I can by as much as I can. I have a desire to reward good writing and increase the community involvement among the WCI community. But fertility treatments? Nope. Not one of the charities I routinely support.
I don’t appreciate your accusation that this is “essentially a fund for assisted reproduction” when it is pretty obvious to everyone who read how the process works that it is not. I’m sorry to hear you will not be a donor in the future. I hope you reconsider. But if not, then I can at least console myself with the fact that I personally donated hundreds of times what you did and EACH of the platinum corporate sponsors also donated hundreds of times what you did. If losing your $10 donation avoids these negative comments directed at the winners, then I say good riddance. In fact, I would have already refunded your donation but I was unable to find one associated with the email address you left on this comment. If you send me your paypal email address, I’ll refund it. That goes for jz too if he/she wants his/her money back too. But please quit pestering the winners. They’re real people, not anonymous internet commenters and you both ought to apologize for such inappropriate comments.
WCI, I congratulated the winner; I did not “pester” him. Please reread for content.
While I can understand where a couple of the posters above are coming from, I would respectfully suggest we consider that what we’ve just read is an excerpt from Joshua’s life. It does not encapsulate his entire raison d’etre and, as such, it seems unreasonable to claim “This fellow seems to care little about others, only his own genetic lineage.” Joshua has shared a very personal struggle which, while it may sound like a “first world problem,” represents his reality here, in the first world.
Some folks may think the criteria for the scholarship need tweaking, but let’s suggest that in a respectful way that also honors the participants who shared a piece of their lives with us.
Agreed. And while this blog is about avoiding indebtedness and gaining financial literacy, I think WCI buys into the MMM philosophy of spending our money on things that bring us REAL happiness (without going into further debt to get them).
For many, including myself, family is priority number 1. We were never going to wait till after med school or residency to start a family. Having a family brings me far more joy and satisfaction than med school ever has. Even if that means I’m taking on more debt than some of my classmates. I will pay off my loans and be debt free before most of them, despite my starting behind the ball.
That’s interesting, because my impression was that MMM is not focussed on happiness per se, but on doing good for society. Of note, he seems to feel quite strongly about having only one child due to the financial and environmental consequences.
While having a family may bring you joy and satisfaction and is certainly within your rights (as long as the taxpayer isn’t funding you), don’t you think you should also consider, in this and everything else, your impact on the rest of this overcrowded, overheated planet?
I sure do.
I really enjoyed reading all of the essays. I have donated two years in a row and will definitely continue to do so.
I volunteered to be a judge and maybe hopefully can in some of the next rounds of essays.
This was a terrible essay. WCI you need to be part of the selection process so sh*t like this does not get posted and people like me who donate do not regret our decision. Unfortunately this is what people who scroll down want to see and it’s sad. I actually enjoyed the essay as it portrayed what we invest in isn’t always money but happiness. Happy is what people should be. Trolling the internet is not funny or cool. Thank you
I think I just got anti-trolled.
Congratulations to the winner and I wish him well. I, like others, do not agree with that this should be the winner. But all of your readers will never agree on a winner. Perhaps, narrowing down to five finalists and allowing all your readers to vote on the final winner would be the most transparent process, although I’m not sure how you would prevent people from voting multiple times.
I considered that and ran into the same problem. If 12 readers can’t agree, why would 100,000 anyway?
I think maybe the solution is just get more people involved. So maybe next year we’ll take hundreds of essays and implement multiple levels of judges. One level chooses semifinalists, one chooses the finalists, and one chooses the winners from the finalists.
One thing that is pretty clear, having seen essentially all the essays, is that these 5 are clearly in the top 10, and the top 10 finalists sent to the judges are clearly in the top 20. But why one over another comes down to the personal preference of whoever is doing the judging. Obviously my top pick only got third from the judges, and barely that. But 80% of applications received read like admissions essays, and it turns out that judges, readers, and even the staff here don’t like reading those so much.
WCI
I have no judgement on whether the winner deserved it or not.
But I do have one thing – Sympathy for you. You had no way to influence the selection of the winner and wisely stayed away from it. And yet you (indirectly through your site) are being accused of giving money to a winner who used it for personal gains.
Maybe a suggestion – like the judge who gives advice to the jury on what evidence should be considered maybe you can do so and state that essay winners should either help in reducing medical school debt or help society but not fulfill personal gains, however much ir tugs our heart strings.
Being a leader is never easy. Not all are satisfied and there are always one or two who sulk. I know that, from running my practice for 16+ years
Money is fungible. If you give a medical student money, he will have less loans than he would if you don’t give him money, whether he blows it on crack and hookers or on IVF. When I meet a medical student who spends nothing except tuition, fees, food, and rent, then I’ll start worrying about that.
Per the essay, Joshua and his wife spent HER SALARY AND NEARLY ALL THEIR SAVINGS on their medical bills. I can not believe the rancor I have seen on this post about his family. If he had no med school debt and entered to win $$ to pay for fertility treatments, that would be a different discussion. But he didn’t. What’s the big deal? Who knows what the other winners spend money on IN THEIR PRIVATE LIVES that they did not disclose in their essays? Just because Joshua chose to share his story has no bearing on the prize money.
Thank you,
I was about to reply to defend myself, but saw you noticed what I actually said. The money from the scholarship will not go to IVF, since we already spent the money we had earned from years of work beforehand. And as you pay all costs up front, there is not even a medical bill remaining that the money could be used on. Instead, the point was having an opportunity to begin investing and bring down loan debt with money that was otherwise missing due to our decision to start a family (which we personally considered more of a need then medical school itself). My essay did not delve into the topics of helping others and looking beyond myself because I was simply answering the question posed with a relevant experience (in a limited number of words). I am grateful for the many donors and WCI, and hope the ruffled feathers are more of a minority view.
Just out of curiosity, how many of the judges and winners are LDS?
I have no idea. I would have to email the 17 of them and ask them. If they write about LDSey subjects or said they went to BYU you might be able to guess. Next I’ll have Lou Dobbs complaining the #mormonmafia is running the WCI scholarship competition. Now that I think about it, I do know the religion of one judge, and it’s not LDS. If any of the judges want to chime in about their religion, they can feel free, but I’m not going to out them as publishing their names was not part of the deal.
I also have no idea what percentage of my readers are of any given religious persuasion but can understand why a white male from Utah who is married with kids instead of a single female from the Bay Area would be more likely to read my blog. Just like an emergency doc would be more likely. I can’t do anything about that. I also know why a med student at an expensive school who is married with kids would be more likely to apply for the scholarship, and that’s not an uncommon situation for an LDS med student, of which there are many. Utah is a net exporter of med students as you may have noticed in your respective med school classes. If your med school took people from out of state, chances are good you had a handful of Utahns in it.
I was thinking about this some more while I was out trimming trees. I think maybe next year we’ll use every single person who volunteers as a judge. I think I had close to 100 volunteers this year. I expect we’ll get something like 500 applications next year, so if have 50 judges be the “screeners” that we send 10 applications a piece to and have them send us the 1-3 best out of their 10, that should give us about 100-150. Then we take those 150 and send them to 30 more judges, give them 15 a piece (so each one is read by three people) and give them points. Then we’ll take the top 10 and send them to the final 20 or so judges to pick the winners. That would be a little more hassle for us, but it would also save us the major hassle of doing the initial screening. I know I’d rather have my staff send out 100 emails or so than spend an entire day reading essays like I have the last couple of years. Maybe that would introduce less bias. But I can never eliminate the bias of those who apply and the bias that WCI readers/judges might like some essays better than others.
At any rate, if anyone else wants to complain about who won this thing, please preface your comment with the amount you donated to the scholarship. This year we gave away about $26,000 in cash. Of that, about $1,300 came from blog readers. $4,000 came directly from my pocket. The remaining $20,700 came from blog sponsors, all of whom were honestly given more “free” advertising than it cost them to sponsor it. It is a well-known secret among my advertisers that the cheapest ads I sell all year are scholarship sponsorships. They sold out in 2 days. In reality, that is all revenue that I gave up as I could have sold all that for at least the same price as the amount contributed. I also donated 200 copies of the WCI book-$4,000 at its $20 list price, (by the way, if I was going to be biased, I would have made sure that the person who won fourth place this year did not go to a school with 200 students in it), a couple hundred dollars in Amazon gift certificates, a couple of days of my time (you know what a doc gets paid), several hundred dollars in advertising costs, and many hours of staff time that I paid for. All in all, I figure I’m into this thing over $30K. Meanwhile, blog readers are in $1,300. I don’t know. It kind of makes me not want to do it when I add all that up and then have to listen to people complain about it. Truly, no good deed goes unpunished. I mean, what possible motivation can people have to complain this thing was biased? Here are the options:
1) You shouldn’t give money to professional students. They’re going to be rich eventually anyway.
Well, if that’s the way you feel, I cannot please you. That was the whole point.
2) You should only give money to people I personally like or agree with or are like me.
As mentioned above, since $30K of it or so was from me, and probably none of it was from you (at most $100), it seems more reasonable to give the money to someone who I personally like than someone you personally like. At any rate, my favorite essay this year only got 3rd place. My favorite one last year didn’t win either by the way.
3) Your scholarship criteria are too vague or your judges are too biased.
If you’re smart, you’ll read the blog, deduce what its regular readers like to read, and write that in your essay. There’s a certain amount of talent there, so in effect, it’s a merit scholarship.
4) You didn’t give the money to the neediest person.
It’s not a need based scholarship. It’s an essay based scholarship. If you want people to consider your need, mention it in your essay. Judges do seem to like those who do mention why they want/need the money, even if the peanut gallery gets mad that it goes to someone who spent a bunch of money on having a kid.
5) The world is run by the Mormon Mafia.
You’re probably a Trump voter so I don’t really care what you think anyway. 🙂
6) You just gave the money away to who you wanted to and didn’t even care what the judges picked or the judges are imaginary.
Uhhhh….okay. Thanks for assailing my integrity. Besides, as we’ve established, it’s apparently mostly my money anyway, so what is there to complain about?
I expect all you complainers to volunteer to judge next year.
Don’t feed the trolls, man!
Amen! I hope that I didn’t come across as a complainer! I am a big fan of WCI, and hopefully tried to explain why there could be perceived bias, not complain. I know that you are a role model for many physicians (and others), and if you have an even bigger following among rock-climbing, mt. biking, married with kids, emergency medicine trained, Utah physicians, all the better.
Moreover, I want to make sure that I do not part feed any #MormonMafia conspiracy. There are reasons why LDS folks make up a greater proportion of med students than general population, and it ain’t because there is a conspiracy. Almost anyone who’s ever completed a mission has the work ethic to succeed at just about anything. My criticism (or perhaps more surprise) was that both winners were looking to use funds to help with fertility issues, rather than they were both of the same gender or religion.
I will leave one last piece of criticism. You said, “At any rate, if anyone else wants to complain about who won this thing, please preface your comment with the amount you donated to the scholarship.” I do think that is a bit harsh. I did not contribute to the scholarship, but I do think that I support this site in other ways (possibly being WCI’s biggest promoter on Bogleheads forums whenever there is a question about whole life/universal life insurance). I feel part of the WCI community, and gives me license to leave comments, feedback and random thoughts.
Count me in for $200 for next year’s scholarship.
Honestly, I didn’t even realize both winners had fertility issues until these critical comments took off. It is an interesting coincidence. It would be more interesting if I worked in a fertility clinic, of course. I guess it really surprised me because I thought by having regular readers be the judges of the finalists no one would ever accuse us of being biased. Apparently that wasn’t quite enough.
You’re always welcome to leave comments, feedback, and random thoughts. I agree that is a big part of why this site is awesome. Sorry for being harsh. Maybe it was the tree trimming. I kind of hate that chore. Maybe I can get the #mormonmafia to do it. 🙂
Im debating proposing to my girlfriend before this years scholarship deadline happens. Def makes for a better story to be married 😀
kidding aside. Congrats man, well written essay had me tearing up a bit when it seemed like you were going to lose your unborn child. I am happy you didn’t and hope that your family is doing well.
I’m interested in applying for this scholarship and it looks like whatever I choose to write about in my essay, I should be sure to be a male and mention that I have children or a child on the way. What do you think? Comment below!
Alternatively, you could simply volunteer to be a judge this year.
Followed up my commitment. Donated to the scholarship.