The National Federation of the Blind awards more than $300,000 in cash and prizes each year to blind students, currently thirty merit-based scholarships of $10,000 apiece. Selection is on academic excellence, community service and leadership; finalists are announced each spring and attend the NFB national convention in July, where the individual scholarship winners are chosen. The programme is open across fields and levels, and past winners have gone into computer science, engineering, civil rights law and diplomacy, making it the single largest funded pipeline for blind students entering technical degrees in the United States. The application for the following year opens in December.