Meet some of our 2020-2021 scholarship recipients, and rewind back to March to learn how – and why – our endowed scholarships support students year after year.

Words by Katie O’Donnell ’07/ Photos by Ryan Mastrangelo

Above is our 2021 Scholarship Portrait Gallery. When Ferro Alumni Center reached out to take “just a couple of photos” of students who wanted to say thank you to their scholarship donors, they were overwhelmed by the response and had to double-up the schedule, and turn down some students – for now. You can click through the photos and hover your cursor over each to read their thank-you messages. Editorial note: these students were permitted to remove their masks for the photo, and the photographer kept a distance of at least 6 feet. 

We had our first scholarship meeting, in person, in very early March. There’s a third-floor conference room in the Theodora J. Kalikow Education Center — the building on campus with the “asparagus” artwork out front — that looks out across to South Street. On that day, we could see students walking to and from classes or their residence halls or the Olsen Student Center or Mantor Library, bundled up for winter. 

Our committee this spring was made up of our chair, Associate Professor of Mathematics Peter Hardy, and members Nicole Achey’ 07, Lecturer of Rehabilitation Services, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education Patti Bailie, Rhonda Jamison, Assistant Professor Psychology, and Assistant Professor of Anthropology Luke Kellett. Our task? Give away more than $200,000* to students who have applied for specific scholarships for the the 2020-2021 school year.

In that room, and later, via Zoom, we pored over student GPAs and financial need, essays and majors, hometowns and high schools. This year, of the students who applied for our named scholarships, 25 of them had perfect 4.0-grade point averages. 25 students who applied, too, have current student loan debt of at least $18,000.

We learned of one young woman who had decided to study Rehabilitation and Counseling Services because, “Struggling with mental health at a young age, made me realize the stigmas society has put on it. I want to change this.” We learned of a young man, the first U.S.-born member of his family, who is determined to graduate without borrowing from his parents: “They have already sacrificed so much for me.”

With students like ours, the $200,000 goes down pretty quickly. They are all deserving.

At the same time we select these deserving students, we remember the reasons behind these scholarships. Like the Kevin Zebrowski Memorial Scholarship, established when Kevin, a friendly and hard-working student at the time, passed away in 1998. Kevin was an avid skier and a devoted member of the Ski Industries.  Or the Clement (Nick) Nickerson ’56 and Patricia Craig ’59 Scholarship created by Nick in memory of Pat to honor their long marriage, and their time at UMF. If you ever have a chance to sit with Nick and hear some of the stories from the Fraternity days, you have to do it! We also remember Jessica Lynn Simcock, who passed away a couple of years after graduation, and her parents and family established the scholarship for aspiring rehabilitation students, like Jessica. There’s history in these funds, and they help carry our students forward.

I had a chance to catch up with Pat Carpenter ‘82, UMF’s former director of gift planning, who helped create so many of these scholarships during her 23-year career at UMF. “I’ll never forget Charlie Leavitt ‘41, for example. He said that Agnes Mantor, who was running the library out of Merrill Hall basement at the time, loaned him $5 because he needed it to finish the semester. This was a big deal back then, too. He said that he was amazed that she never had him write a promissory note, that she said, ‘When you can, pay it back,’ and he never forgot.”

The thing is, as these endowed scholarships go, we did the same thing last year and the year before that. We’ll do the same thing next year, and the year after that. “That’s what’s so amazing about these scholarships,” said Pat. “They will continue forever, changing lives, one or two at a time, every single year.”

*This doesn’t include the tens of thousands of dollars of scholarship money allocated by the teams in Admission and Financial Aid for incoming and transfer students or department-specific awards. The list goes on.

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