Announcing! The 2018 winner of the Clambake Society Scholarship is Colton Krueger! The first future college athlete we’ve selected (as far as we were told, anyway!) (football at Hillsdale!), the creation he wrote about was also in the area of athletics! Frisbee baseball looks fun all around, but the diagram is what really sold us. Congratulations to Colton and since we’re posting this well after his first year at college was done, we hope he had a great first year!
Thanks for another great year, everybody! Lots of good applications, and the choice between the final three was pretty tough! Winner to be announced RHS Scholarship Night as usual!
Fun fact about exclamation points! Our second application, in 2008, featured these “questions”:
The winner’s answer to the latter question included the line “I believe that exclamation points should only be used in extreme cases where they are warranted, such as losing a limb or buying a new car.” At the time, that was pretty close to The Clambake Society’s official position. But things change a lot in a decade, and we now believe the only sentences that don’t deserve exclamation points are the boring ones. Think about it. Thinking emoji.
Where’s, like, the “re-post” button on this thing? Everything’s the same as last year except the dates! Even if this website doesn’t always show it, we’re always excited to do this! Thanks everybody!
Get your eyes checked, because you are, in fact, seeing double! Hot on the heels of our successful 2016 fundraising campaign, Bare Bones* (Email) Blast 2016, comes the most hotly anticipated email of the year: Email Blast 2017: The Copy-Pastening. Our original idea for a new 2017 fundraiser did not come to fruition this year, but we continue to work on that idea and other new ideas behind the scenes, while also revisiting old ones. Watch this space for more info…
As always, we’d like thank everybody who has contributed in the past. With your help, we’ve collected more than $30,000 for awesome RHS graduates, and given scholarships to 12 of them. Your support means a lot to us, because giving back, and remaining connected to Rhinelander, mean so much to us.
But without further ado, we’d like to direct you to the hardest working page on this site, the “Donate” page. While the 2018 tax code may end up being very different, your 2017 donations will still be tax deductible for sure. Receipts will be emailed to donors in January. THANK YOU SO MUCH!
* as we understand it, “half-assed” is not considered safe for polite conversation, so we’re not going to say that, even though “Half-Assed Email Blast” has such a nice ring to it.
Congratulations to Shelby Kuehn, our 2017 winner!
As we mentioned before, this was the most difficult decision we’ve had in a long time, and for positive reasons. Each judge votes based on their own criteria, but the consensus was that five different applicants had the best submissions for at least one of the eight questions. A couple of the runners-up had some of the finest single answers we’ve ever received.
Shelby’s application was solid from start to finish, but her original creation was uniquely moving and took us to places we’ve never been in our years of judging. She’s going to UW-Stevens Point next year to study education, and we’re sure her future students will be lucky to have her. Congratulations, Shelby. We wish you the best in the future. And thanks to all the 2017 applicants for a very memorable year!
We just want to take a moment out of another busy day in the lab judging applications to say “thank you” to everyone who applied. In the past when we’ve gotten a smaller number of applications, it has usually meant an easier decision process, because usually one or two have stood way out above the rest. This year, despite the number of submissions being down, we’ve been really impressed by the thoughtfulness, depth, and beauty of several of them. This is one area where we really appreciate having a more difficult choice, and we thank you for what you’ve shared with us. The winner will be announced at the RHS Awards night.
We really wanted to use this photo, but we were afraid that the colors in the test tubes might give away whose application we were analyzing.
WOOOOOHOOOOOO, IT’S 2017 SCHOLARSHIP SEASON ALREADY AND THAT MEANS IT’S TIME TO POST A “PDF COPY” OF THE EXACT SAME FILE THAT YOU CAN GET ON THE RHS WEBSITE! YEAH!
FOR THE CASUAL OBSERVERS, THERE’S NOTHING IN THE WAY OF MEANINGFUL UPDATES SINCE LAST YEAR, SO YOU DON’T REALLY NEED TO BOTHER LOOKING AT THIS ONE! FOR THE APPLICANTS, YOU’VE HAD LIKE A WHOLE YEAR TO COME UP WITH GREAT ANSWERS TO THESE EXACT SAME QUESTIONS, SO WE EXPECT GREAT THINGS, HAHAHAHAHAHA.
We’re looking forward to the day when we can remove the “no Miley Cyrus” admonishment from the instructions. Could this be the last year we need it? Probably?
Good luck, have fun, if you’re doing a haiku, it would be better if you could make it non-sports-related, but that instruction/admonishment isn’t in the official instructions, so we won’t officially give you a hard time about that. That said, do remember that there’s more to haiku than structure and meter.
Planning is underway for our (hopefully) big and gigantic 2017 fundraiser event in Rhinelander. It’s far too soon to actually announce the event, because there are many moving parts and many different ways it could go when starting a brand new endeavor like this. What we can say (but not “announce”) is that we’re working on putting together an event on RHS Homecoming Weekend, and that we’re hoping to open things up and attract a wider group of people than we’ve had at the fundraising dinner events we’ve thrown in the past. Watch this space for more barely-informative posts up until the point when we can actually announce something! And save the date! September 30th! Time of day not yet known!
Many thanks to everybody who pitched in for our bare bones 2016 email blast fundraiser! We continue to be overwhelmed by your generosity, particularly in helping out for our first PayPal-only fundraising “event” when even the sales pitch isn’t very exciting. Thanks to you, in let’s say “a few short days during the hectic holiday season” (actually, nearly all the money came in the last 15 hours of the year, due to the timing of the big email blast), we pulled in more than enough to fund the 2016 scholarship and keep the momentum going as we head into 2017, a year that will see very big changes for our fundraising methods. More on that later, watch this space!
Again, many thanks to the donors who pitched in. We couldn’t do this without you all! THANKS EVERYBODY!
We’ve got big plans for something very new for 2017, but we haven’t had an official fundraiser for 2016 yet (the raffle was actually 2015’s fundraiser, despite the date of the drawing). As such, with little fanfare, but a couple email blasts, we’re requesting PayPal donations to keep the lights on at Clambake Society Scholarship international headquarters. Or maybe to keep our savings from shrinking while we keep giving out scholarships to deserving and awesome Rhinelander High School graduates. We may not actually own any light bulbs, sockets, wiring, or an office to use them in, but we do have a fantastic PayPal link on our fabulous “Donate” page, so please head over there if you want to pitch in for 2016. Donations are tax deductible, and receipts will be emailed to donors in January.
