A Celebration of Hope: New undergraduate scholars recognized at the CPS scholarship banquet
The room was filled with hope and anticipation as students, faculty, friends, family, and donors gathered to celebrate this year’s undergraduate scholarship award winners.
The College of Professional Studies at Northeastern has long been rooted in advancing access to opportunity for learners at every stage of life to pursue their educational and career goals. One of the biggest hurdles to realizing those dreams is the funding to pay for it.
This year, more than $500,000 in scholarships were awarded to over 250 undergraduate students.
According to Jodie Adams, an incoming student who works at General Electric as a production machinist, the scholarship funds coupled with his employer’s tuition support aligned perfectly to make pursuing his Advanced Manufacturing Systems degree the clear path forward.
“This degree is going to allow me to grow my career in new ways,” Adams said. “I’m excited to get started.”
Adams is a recipient of the new Ditchfield AI scholarship, specifically established for students from three public high schools in the city of Lynn, Massachusetts area with an interest in AI. It is a great example of how CPS continues to partner with alumni and others to advance opportunities in an ever-changing workplace climate.
As the room settled to listen to speakers and a panel of student-scholars, Nadia Hall, a scholarship winner pursuing her degree in Management said she was particularly excited to hear from alumni and what their experience was like at Northeastern. Asked why she decided to go back to school, she said that it was really about fulfilling a dream for her family.
“I really want to make my family proud, my mother especially,” she said, “it’s also just about self-fulfillment. It’s an opportunity to grow.”
Sitting next to Nadia was Ishmael Lachmi, an Information Technology major who shared Nadia’s excitement for self-fulfillment, adding that coming to Northeastern was really seamless for him.
“The way my community college credits just plugged right in helped make it so much easier to start here,” he said. “It just made sense, and with the scholarship it just removed a lot of the pressure to go back to school.”
And that theme was a major takeaway from the evening.
Scholarships are more than money. They are a powerful way individuals who have the means and motivation can remove both the practical and mental barriers for people to realize a new future version of themselves. Imagine being able to remove worry from someone’s mind. Or provide comfort to someone who is feeling stress and anxiety. To help someone start down a pathway that previously felt out of reach.
The power of that gift is priceless.
