Hello All!
Here is where I plan to record my adventure into what is called MSA. MSA stands for Missouri Scholars Academy and is a three-week-long program during the summer for selected sophomores going into their junior year. I was one such sophomore and tomorrow is the first day of the academy. I am really looking forward to it. I’ll start by telling about what led up to this eventful post!

Back when school was in session, I recieved notification by our school counselor that I had been nominated by the faculty, along with 5 other students, to write some essays for some crazy thing called MSA. I was up for that and decided to do so. A couple of the other students decided to be lazy and didnt turn in essays… hey, less competition for me. The essays we wrote were reviewed by the staff and the writer of the best essays was to be our school’s nomination for MSA. It turns out that was me. My essays were then sent to another review board where the attendees of the academy were selected. Then we wait.

After a while, it was near the end of school, I recieved a letter saying that I could attend the Academy if I wished. That was cool I guess, I had no idea what to expect so I wasn’t too very excited about it. Well as it turns out this “MSA” is quite a big deal. When I go and tell my family about this thing the first thing my mathy-grandpa does is calculate the odds that I would get into this Academy (these were random hat pick odds) and its 1 in ?(remind me to get this number from him later). Then at our school awards thing they made me stand up and everything. Ok, so this is a big deal… I’m trying to tell you that if you have a chance at this thing go for it. You get your name out, its a great deal in the long run, and I havent even been to the thing yet! It makes me wonder if all this spam I’m getting is because of this… oh well.

So I’m talking to my friend one day and I mention MSA and she flips out. It turns out she attended MSA two years before I did. Since I still hadn’t fully decided to spend three weeeks of my summer on this I asked her if I should and I got back a definant yes. I trust my friend so that basically decided for me that I would attend. She told me that it sounds very school-like but its alot more fun than that. I can only hope so… I mean… this is my summer!

So in the middle of my packing I get the idea to blog this, maybe to help me remember it all, or to help some possible scholar decided to go. I am hoping to blog each day of my stay there and hopefully by the end I will have made a resource that future MSA scholars will find useful, and something I can remember it all by.

See you at MSA!

–nathanielguy

All pictures will be posted here, with permission of course: My Picserv