A student from Northern high school is in the running for a $100,000 scholarship to a Canadian university.
Grade 12 student Blake Freer, 17, is one of 88 finalists competing in the Loran Scholars Foundation national selections in Toronto this weekend.
The foundation selects up to 36 students each year, from a pool of thousands, for an undergraduate scholarship valued at $100,000.
Freer said he's honoured to be recognized.
"[The award] covers a lot of important character traits like leadership and service, so I'm excited to be considered because I know there is going to be a lot of great leaders that I'm meeting, so it's pretty exciting to be considered among that group of people."
Freer was one of nearly 5,200 students across Canada who applied for the scholarship back in the fall.
"In November I was selected to go to the semi finals, which was a day long interview in Waterloo with 20 other students from southern Ontario where I talked about my volunteering, extra curricular activities and kind of my perspective on society. And then a couple weeks later, I got a call saying that I've advanced to the national finals."
This weekend's national selections will narrow the field down even further.
Freer said he likes his chances.
"There's 88 of us who are at the national finals and 36 will be getting the top award, and I'm going to go there and I'm going to go through the interviews and talk to everybody and see what they think of me."
Freer said he still has a decision to make when it comes to what university he's heading to in the fall.
"I've applied to four schools for engineering -- don't really know where I'm going yet or even what field of engineering I'm going into, so I've selected mostly general programs," he said. "I want to go through engineering so I can learn the science and theoretical stuff behind designing new products, and I want to do innovation related to renewable energy sources for the future because I think that's going to be really important for the world coming up."
LORAN, short for Long-Range Aid to Navigation, is a system that uses three points, character, service and leadership, to determine one's course for a long journey.
The foundation says the name emphasizes the lifelong impact and values of being a Loran Scholar.
