By Anastasia Benstead, Asst. Editor in Chief
Every year Aquinas hosts the Spectrum of Scholarships Competition in which accepted students gather on campus participating in various workshops and ultimately writing an essay. This essay is the criteria on which the students are scored and awarded tuition scholarships. Five students will receive some amount of scholarship money. The fifth student receiving $1,000 and the first place student will receive full tuition: the closest thing Aquinas has to a full ride. This year’s winner of the 30th annual SSC is freshman Romy McKellar.
Romy is a graduate of City High Middle School and a psychology and communications major. Romy is also a member of the junior varsity women’s soccer team, only further demonstrating her love of the Aquinas community.
“I remember getting a call from an unknown number in my last class at school one day and I assumed it was a spam call.” McKellar reported. She could hardly believe it was real– and in fact, her family didn’t. “I remember my whole family thinking that I was pranking when I told them the results.”
But it was not a prank. McKellar stunned the judges with her essay. After being given the choice to either write on whether personal finance should be a required class for AQ students or if ChatGPT should be allowed in schools, she chose the latter. Her argument in the essay was that the use of generative AI was exactly the same as a textbook and hence should not be forbidden, stating “Instead of looking at textbooks like resources to cheat and find information, educators found a way to use them as a reference tool for learning.” At first she was nervous to write about a perspective that many professors may not agree with, however, she stuck to her gut and wrote about what she truly believed. Likely, this is what granted her such success in the essay competition.
The advice she would most want to give to freshmen is that everyone should apply and compete for one of the tuition scholarships offered by Aquinas. You never know what it could lead to. Going into it, she does not remember being anxious, but leading up to SSC day “everyone kept reassuring me that I shouldn’t be nervous, so naturally I started getting nervous.” In the end nerves did not seem to matter for McKellar. These next few years will be quite exciting as she continues to forge ahead on her Aquinas journey.
Romy McKellar in her soccer uniform after signing with Aquinas.
Romy McKellar smiles for senior photo
The Saint 