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The Center for the Education and Women+ recently named their 54th annual scholarship and fellowship recipients, awarding more than $870,000 to 113 University of Michigan students. The scholarship serves commuter and transfer students, students of Color and those who identify as women, and is open to undergraduate, masters’ and doctoral students. Scholarship recipients underwent a competitive application process and were selected based on their expressed desire to create social change and their potential to impact the fields in which they plan to work.
Erin Lane, scholarship program manager at CEW+, told The Daily in an interview that CEW+ works with scholarship recipients on a case-by-case basis to cover more than just their tuition. Lane said the scholarship is part of a broader effort to help students from marginalized communities pursue their educational and professional goals.
“We try to work with our scholarship recipients around the type of support that they need,” Lane said. “For some students, the scholarship is best used towards tuition and fees at U of M, and other students are looking for support for other types of living expenses, including child care, and so are we are able to work with people on a one on one basis to provide the support that’s most needed for them.”
In an interview with The Michigan Daily, LSA junior Anthony Preston explained he is now pursuing his bachelor’s degree after having taken a break from school to work full time. He said the CEW+ scholarships help him to focus on college, instead of having to work to pay tuition expenses and the expensive gas bills that come as a commuter student.
“That’s been huge, having the extra money on the side to be able to basically afford to get here every day while I’m working on trying to find a way to move out here,” Preston said. “It’s definitely enabled me to focus on college in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to without it because I would have had to seek employment.”
Law School student Lura Morton received a scholarship from CEW+ and told The Daily in an interview that many Law School graduates seek careers at large and prestigious law firms to pay off debt. Morton said scholarships like the one she received relieved some of the financial burden of higher education, allowing her to follow her passion for working in human rights law.
“Most people finish (law school) with a lot of debt, and as a result, people go into what is called ‘Big Law’ to pay off their loans,” Morton said. “I’m going to try as hard as possible to not have to do that — I would really like to stay in public interest. I want to continue to work in the human rights field because that’s why I went to law school, to keep working on human rights issues.”
Lane said the scholarships recognize what the recipients bring to the University and the Center’s commitment to remaining a place of support for underrepresented students.
“For our 2024 scholarship recipients, we hope that you’ll see that you have a community of supporters in (CEW+),” Lane said. “There are people here at our center and among your fellow scholar community who care about what you’re doing on campus, who want to see you succeed, and who are trying to help remove some of the barriers that might be in your pathway to reaching your educational and professional goals.”
Rackham student Noor Al-Samarrai told The Daily that she feels CEW+ supports her identity as an Arab American female writer. She said the scholarship has allowed her to pursue her dream of being a professor and role model for others of her same background.
“As an Arab American woman, the pathway of being a writer was not carved out,” Al-Samarrai said. “There weren’t a ton of models for that growing up. … Being able to have the support of this extra scholarship allows me to live my life in a way that I can have a strong enough foundation, that I can be that example for other people.”
Daily Staff Reporter Elizabeth Stafford can be reached at libstaf@umich.edu.
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