Ethos

High school students often have interests that fall outside of a traditional high school curriculum and thus have difficulty justifying pursuing these interests to authority figures (e.g., teachers, administrators, or parents, who are not familiar enough with the area to judge its merit). An additional hurdle is a lack of capital to fund their interest. The Neat Grant seeks to partially alleviate both of these by first providing credibility to the idea via a vetting process performed by field experts, as well as providing a small amount of no-strings-attached cash that can be used in pursuit of the interest. The ideal outcome is that a Neat Grant recipient would be able to point to this grant as evidence that their interests are worth exploring, while simultaneously using the cash to fund their investigations. We also hope that the cash award provides the recipient with a sense of pride and accomplishment.

We offer two grants, one to high school juniors and one to high school seniors, that are given out near the end of the typical US school year. For high school juniors, we hope to enable students to explore an interesting and challenging project that they may not otherwise have been able to pursue, especially things that would augment a college application. For high school seniors, we seek to address the limbo zone that graduating high schoolers fall into: they tend to be done with college applications (and so no longer need to generate resume items) and have relatively large amounts of free time, but they are too old to qualify for programs aimed at high schoolers, too young to qualify for programs aimed at college students, and too inexperienced to land internships in a technical field.