Every year, 1600 high school seniors across the nation gear up to apply for the Intel Science Talent Search. At stake are fame, fortune, and good-looking people of the opposite gender. The grueling application must be submitted and received at the Washington , D.C. office by mid-November.

From this pool of talented youth, 300 semifinalists are selected and the list is posted online in mid-January. Each semifinalist will receive $1000 and will earn his or her school $1000. Semifinalists' teachers are also recognized.

At the end of January, 40 finalists are chosen from those 300 to attend the Science Talent Institute (STI) in mid-March. That list is also posted online. Phone calls are made out to the finalists (usually on the night before the online announcements are made, although there have been surprise cases where phone calls are skipped and the applicant is notified the next day by special guests :D).

This "choosing" of semifinalists and finalists is the part that really is mysterious. Various people tried to explain the process to us at the STI, and the message I came away with was that it's really complicated and pretty flexible, but fair. For a while, a point system is involved, but it's not absolute--papers are reread and can move up or down from their original position.

Each finalist receives a $5000 scholarship and a nice Intel laptop (2006 Intel STS Finalists got a spiffy Dell D610, 2.13 GHz and 1 gigabyte RAM). 1st through 10th places are determined by judging during the STI, and these students receive scholarships ranging from $20,000 to the grand prize of $100,000.