On April 20, Susan Chen (I) won the Amazon Future Engineer Scholarship.
After hearing about the scholarship from a friend, she decided to apply. Susan was selected as one of 400 scholars to receive a scholarship of up to 40,000 dollars and a paid internship at Amazon.
In December of 2023, Chen began her application process and recalls that “the application itself [doesn’t] have that many questions, but instead, it amasses simple and thoughtful college-level questions that are [often] asked during college admissions.”
Partnering with Scholarship America, Amazon created this program to open up new career opportunities and provide new initiatives for computer science, aimed at students from disadvantaged backgrounds. They chose scholars based on their academic achievement, leadership, extracurricular activities, work experience and future goals.
Students are encouraged to apply to a variety of scholarship opportunities because of the high sticker price of colleges with the tuition, room and board of many private universities often reaching 90,000 dollars per year. Internship opportunities, furthermore, are highly valued — especially at a major technology company such as Amazon which boasts an acceptance rate of less than ten percent.
Boston Latin School Science Department Head Ms. Kathleen Bateman adds, “Students should apply for every award available because a student [who is] high achieving often [forgets] how special they are as individuals, and [teachers] are glad that this uniqueness is recognized by external partners and external organizations.”
In 2019, Amazon launched the Future Engineer scholarship program and has given out over 54 million dollars to students in scholarships.
Students who are currently enrolled in, or have completed, a high school or college dual degree course focused on computer science, engineering or robotics are eligible to apply for the scholarship.
BLS AP Physics C: Mechanics teacher Mr. Jesse Southwick, who wrote Chen’s recommendation letter for the scholarship, comments, “Chen was an excellent physics student who worked hard to learn physics and to get better […] so I’m sure that she would make a great engineer.”
Chen had originally decided to major in computer engineering but heard that there was a broad scope of learning in electrical engineering because it contains both computer science and electrical engineering courses in one major. After putting some thought into doing a double major, she has decided that she would like to major in electrical engineering with a minor in computer science.
Chen has committed to Boston University, where she will be attending this fall. She hopes to make use of the valuable job experience she will gain from the internship at Amazon.
Winning this scholarship means a lot to Chen, and she offers advice to underclassmen: “Make sure [to] take opportunities that [you] think that [you] don’t have a chance at because [you’ll] never know what can happen.”
