The Hours a Scholarship Gives Back

Cradle-2-Graduation StoriesGraduate

Ask what a scholarship buys and the honest answer is usually not tuition. It is hours. The ones a student does not have to sell in order to stay enrolled.

Karen Garcia graduated from UC San Diego summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in global health and a minor in biology. Over four years she carried support from BASIC’s general fund and four separate named scholarships, and her account of what that changed is unusually precise about the mechanism.

1. Imagination Library
2. Family Literacy
3. TK Academy
4. Learning Academy
5. ×4Scholarship, completed, with four named awards
6. Graduate, completed

Four named awards in four years, on top of the general fund.

Four funds, four purposes

Each named scholarship is established by a donor for a stated purpose and awarded to a scholar who fits it. Karen fit four of them at once, which says something about the range of a single global health degree.

• The Joanne and Richard Scholarship — academic excellence
• The Jerry Goldsmith Memorial Scholarship — health care
• The P.E.O. Scholarship — a woman pursuing an education
• The Edith A. Schmitt Memorial Scholarship — nursing

Permission to change her mind

She went to UC San Diego intending to enter health care, because she enjoyed helping people. Working through jobs with patient contact, she realized she had never allowed herself to look at anything else, and began to wonder whether engineering or computer science might be a way of helping people too.

So she started taking the courses. She is working toward software engineering now, which is not what any of her four named scholarships were established to fund.

BASIC supported that. Its awards are written to cover educational opportunities at all levels rather than a single named destination, so a scholar who reconsiders halfway is not penalized for it. That is a deliberate design choice, and Karen is what it looks like in practice.

Karen also appears on BASIC Salutes Its Graduates.