BY DANI TIETZ
dani@mahometnews.com
Mahomet-Seymour senior Tim Glumac was recently named as a National Merit Scholarship Finalist.
Glumac’s junior-year PSAT score put him on the list of 16,000 semifinalists. After evaluating other measures, such as GPA, transcript and essays, Glumac stood with the top one-percent of all high school seniors to be considered for the 2,500 National Merit Scholarships worth approximately $31 million.
To become a finalist, semifinalists must have an outstanding academic record throughout high school, receive an endorsement/recommendation from their high school principal and earn SAT scores that confirm their previous test performances. Semifinalists must also submit an essay and detailed application, which demonstrate their participation and leadership in their schools and communities.
“Going through the application process and then actually getting to move on to the finals, I realized that there’s (approximately) six students in like two decades from (Mahomet-Seymour) high school that have done this,” Glumac said.
In the same breath, he also said, “I don’t see it for more than it’s worth; I’m good at standardized testing.”
Glumac is proficient in more than testing, though.
He has applied to 14 universities on the East Coast with the desire to study finance. He’s eyeing NYU and Pennsylvania above the others.
“I’m super into research, math, leadership and management,” he said. “With finance I can do all of these things at a very high level.
“With finance I’m interacting with different customers, different industries, different problems,” he said. “There’s a lot of variety and a lot of competition in it. I can take my competitive instincts and put it into an area where there’s a lot of variety.”
Glumac said that he took a different approach to high school than many of his peers. Instead of hopping on the path to becoming Valedictorian or to go into a STEM-related career, Glumac wanted to feed his intellectual curiosity more than anything.
Many Mahomet-Seymour students take a certain pattern of classes to boost their GPA to land them in the top 10-percent of their graduating class. Glumac said he was looking to hit his peak level of academic performance by his senior year.
“For me, it’s really about learning and growing,” he said.
“I’ve always been very academically motivated, but not in the way some other people are, there’s something intrinsic about it for me, something intrinsic about doing well in a class, that’s the learning experience for me.”
Because of this mentality, Glumac is known as a jack-of-all-trades throughout Mahomet-Seymour High School.
His best friend jokes, “Tim’s been an expert at everything at some point.”
There isn’t much downtime for his curious spirit. Whether he’s listening to a podcast about psychiatry or learning more about airlines, Glumac has a way to dive right into any subject.
“I’m constantly going out of my way to learn about different fields,” he said. “I’ll gather new knowledge, whether that’s reading the news or watching lectures or doing research.”
Glumac has been a page for Senator Chapin Rose consistently in previous years. His interest in politics has not subsided, either.
“I actually read a lot of books, a lot of papers on public policy over the summer and over the first semester,” he said.
“Even though I have no aspirations of pursuing that further, I think these are super cool problems. There’s so many different approaches to them and everything’s so divisive. I’ve really enjoyed learning about the hard science of the issues.”
Unlike many other teenagers, Glumac doesn’t just think about the here and now. He’s constantly looking outside of the box and down his path.
As he investigated the programs he wanted to pursue in his next step of life, Glumac created a graph with acceptance rates and mapped out the possibility of getting accepted.
“There’s a lot of forward thinking that goes hand-in-hand with a lot of intensive learning,” he said.
Glumac believes that his parents’ willingness to allow him to take the reigns as he navigated what interested him over the last couple years allowed him the freedom to think outside the box.
“I’m very self-driven, self-motivated and self-regulating,” he said. “They trust me. They see my grades are fine. They see that I’m somewhat busy and they just trust in that. I’m really thankful for that.”
Some of his friends have had different experiences both at home and at school. Glumac said that he’s heard that some parents are hovering over the college-application process. But he said the “non-obvious social pressures” to go into certain fields that students feel at the high school and in the Mahomet community may be “more dangerous.”
Glumac said that high-level high school students are feeling the pressure to go on a STEM-related or engineering path and to stay close to home when they may have other aspirations.
“(There is) very little encouragement to really take a unique path,” he said.
“A lot of kids have the potential to do that but just because the culture is very strong engineering and Midwest, very few kids do break out of that, when I think a lot of people could.”
He hopes that moving forward the school, community and society will help relieve pressure from students and help provide them with resources on a variety of opportunities that can be gained after doing well on their SAT or from finding academic success at Mahomet-Seymour.
Glumac’s freedom to explore his interests allowed him to take leaps that others may not have. Doing what he wants helps him to have that intrinsic motivation.
Instead of getting a job for minimum wage, Glumac turned his interest in video games into a paid position where he coached eSports professionally.
Coaching players in North and South America and Asia, Glumac used his skill set to practice leadership and management skills at a real level.
“When you’re getting paid to manage a team with sponsors in big tournaments with big deadlines, that was a really big help to me,” he said. “I don’t think there’s anything I could supplant that experience with; having 10 plus people counting on you to deliver results.
“That was a huge sort of trial for me. Since I was 16, I’ve been working with people significantly older than me, trying to hold a leadership position. It was very difficult, but I really enjoyed it.
“Kids don’t get that opportunity to really do something unique that really tests them in a very tangible way where there’s actual stakes.”
Glumac is taking his final semester of high school off from his job to focus on the next steps of preparing for college.
“I’m going to be doing some out-of-school study to prep for finance clubs going into freshman year,” he said.
In the meantime, Glumac waits to hear back about the National Merit Scholarships.
The National Merit Scholarship Corporation will begin announcing approximately 1,000 corporate-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards, and approximately 4,000 college-sponsored Merit Scholarship awards in April.
