Scholars recieve free money and campus tour
On Monday, 350 of Utah State University’s top prospective students spent the day with their parents on campus trying to decide if this is the right place for them.
All of these students are recipients of either the Presidential scholarship or the Dean’s scholarship, two of the highest scholarships given for academics by the university. As a group, these students have an average high school grade point average of 3.91 and an average ACT score of 28.3.
“This is a chance for these students to really take a look at Utah State and make sure this is the right fit for them,” said Joyce Kinkead, vice provost for undergraduate studies and research. “If students are interested in chemical engineering or dance, this is not the right fit for them. We care enough to be very straight forward because when we enroll a student we want to graduate a student.”
All the Presidential scholars were invited to spend Monday night on campus and interview for the most prestigious scholarship USU offers, the Fellowship scholarship.
The Fellowship gives undergraduate students the opportunity to begin research with a professor mentor in their field of interest beginning their freshman year. It also awards them another $1,000 per year in addition to the $1,500 they receive every semester if they are in-state students, or $3,000 if they are out-of-state students. The scholarship is granted for eight semesters, or four years.
“We have about 140 that have applied for the research scholarship,” Kinkead said. “We expect to award between 30 and 40.”
Last year 47 Fellowship scholarships were awarded.
Mary Shepherd was a recipient of the scholarship last year. Shepherd is a math-statistics composite major, and has focused her research on the effectiveness of different teaching styles.
“All the people I work with are becoming teachers,” Shepherd said. “We want to be able to teach our students in the best way possible. It’s a learning experience for us, and we then pass our information onto the state and it becomes a learning experience for them. It helps them teach teachers how to teach more effectively.”
This has also been a learning experience for USU.
“What we have learned by looking at Utah State is that we are very good at hands on education,” Kinkead said. “Our scholarship program allows our very best, our top one and two percent, to have hands on research experience from the first day of their freshman year.”
Andrea Severson, another recipient of the Fellowship, is majoring in fisheries and aquatic sciences and has been working on research in the College of Natural Resources in the aquatics, watershed and earth resources department.
“I wanted to work with fish research,” Severson said, “and Dr. Chris Luecke found a way for me to work with the exact things that I’m interested in, and placed me there.”
Severson has already finished one project that was a nutritional study to see what diet was best to raise Least Chub Fry. She presented her findings to Bonneville Chapter of the American Fisheries Society Meeting on Tuesday.
“The opportunity I’ve had to work as a research fellow has been really beneficial because I’ve gotten to work with professionals from day one,” Severson said. “I’ve seen the challenges of research. You have a lot of success, but you also have a lot of failures.
“It’s interesting to see how the scientific process really works. It helps to get your hands dirty, and find out what people are really out doing in your field. It’s cool to see the products of your work, and know that you’re gaining something.”
Allowing the students the opportunity to do research has changed other things on campus, too.
“I think it’s made a difference in the way our classes are taught,” Kinkead said. “Faculty have said to us that students have higher expectations for their classes. We are trying to take greater care of our students and everybody wins when that happens.”
Throughout the day the prospective students were also given a sample of what campus life is like a USU. They were separated into two groups, those interested in sciences and those interested in arts, and they were able to attend sample lectures.
The students were then able to attend four, 20-minute sessions about different parts of the university.
These sessions went over Student Orientation, Advising, and Registration (SOAR), scholarship and financial aid, student life and housing.
They were then given the opportunity to meet with different colleges and departments at a college fair. Later in the afternoon the perspective students were given campus tours.
At dinner in the evening, USU professor Bonnie Glass-Coffin invited the perspective students to take advantage of internship programs and study abroad, and to really explore their options before deciding on a major. Glass-Coffin also urged the students to expect change before they expected to change the world.
-apassey@cc.usu.edu