Students speak on behalf of scholarships
 |
| Mary Small and Nitin Sekar |
Nitin Sekar and Mary Small, both merit scholarship recipients, were featured speakers at the 2008 Carolina Scholars Reception. Learn more about them and read their remarks:
Nitin Sekar is a Chancellor’s Carolina Scholar from Cincinnati, Ohio. A senior, he is majoring in biology and environmental science, with a minor in chemistry. His many honors include being named a Morris K. Udall Scholar; receiving the Ernest L. Mackie Award, which goes to a junior UNC male student for most outstanding scholarship and leadership; and being a finalist for the Rhodes Scholarship. Nitin has made the Dean’s List every semester. He is a member of Phi Betta Kappa and the Order of the Golden Fleece, UNC’s highest honor for service to the University. Nitin co-founded the UNC-Duke-Bennett Millennium Village project, which has raised $1.2 million to help lift a Kenyan village out of poverty and establish sustainable development for its citizens. Nitin has studied abroad in South Africa and conducted research in Siberia. He plans to attend graduate school after his time at Carolina.
Mary Small is a William M. Lamont, Jr. Carolina Scholar from Greensboro, majoring in sociology and public policy. A Phi Betta Kappa member, she has made the Dean’s List every semester. She has studied abroad in Singapore and Ecuador. Like Nitin, Mary has been a driving force behind the UNC-Duke-Bennett Millennium Village project. Her many other acts of public service include founding Extended Disaster Relief, which takes students on week-long work trips to the Gulf Coast to help in Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts. Such involvement led to Mary being inducted into the Order of the Old Well, which recognizes students who have given unselfish service and distinguished leadership to UNC and the greater community. She also received the Jane Craige Gray Memorial Award, given to the woman of the UNC junior class judged most outstanding in character, scholarship and leadership.
Carolina Scholars reception speeches
Nitin Sekar: I appreciate the generous introduction! It’s always nice when someone reads about my few accomplishments without listing with them my faults and failures. However, in the interest of balance and full disclosure, I have to make a confession that pains me now, as a devoted Tarheel and adopted son of Carolina: four years ago, I really, really did not want to come to UNC.
I had applied on a whim. I didn’t realize that getting into UNC from out of state was so difficult, and I figured that UNC, like all state schools, was a ‘safety school.’ I ask for forgiveness for my arrogance: I was ignorant, and I was brainwashed. I had been infected by this strange concept of prestige, and for some reason I honestly believed that Washington University St. Louis and Yale, two of my main alternatives, could offer me something UNC could not.
I most certainly would have chosen to attend one of those private schools were it not for two factors. First, I was very aware that Chapel Hill was a much sunnier, warmer place than St. Louis or New Haven. Secondly, a few weeks before my decision, I had received a big white envelope offering me some generically named award—a “Carolina Scholarship”—that would make UNC more affordable than my private school options. Out of some admittedly uncharacteristic concern for my parents’ financial situation, I decided to come to UNC: but it really was a purely financial—and somewhat climatological—decision. And to be honest, I viewed that decision as a compromise of the quality of my education.
Of course, it wasn’t long before I realized that I had not compromised anything in my endeavor to be economical. UNC in general, and the Carolina Scholars program in particular, created for me a community and environment more enriching than anything I had imagined for my undergraduate career. I have had the opportunity to study ecology in three countries, work on projects in international philanthropy, and learn from international leaders in conservation and development. The Carolina Scholars program introduced me to advisers who must be the best in the world, who’ve helped me clarify and achieve my goals. Dr. Sarah Shields is my Scholar’s group adviser; I remember especially that she helped me gain my footing in those first critical weeks my first year. Dr. Greg Gangi has become, I think, the one most influential person in my educational history, and I honestly wonder now and then if my college resume is more a product of my efforts or Dr. Gangi’s inspiration and vision. Dr. Peter Kaufman, with his indefatigable and lovable eccentricity, has repeatedly put me in intellectual circumstances that make me unsure if I actually know anything—a healthy ego-check that ultimately strengthens one’s convictions. By introducing students to these forward-thinking professors, the Carolina Scholars’ program helps us find the support we need to navigate the infinite options of UNC life.
Most importantly, however, the Carolina Scholars Program, along with the other scholars’ programs at UNC, have introduced me to students whom I am sure will be my life mentors and my allies in the effort to improve the world. Some of my best friends are Carolina Scholars; they have influenced me positively at every corner. Interestingly, James Norton and I and another friend were driving home one day last year when we realized all three of us had turned down Yale to come to UNC. We started talking, and we soon named seven people we knew at Carolina who had turned down Yale, and maybe another half-dozen that had rejected Harvard to come to UNC. We realized that our circle of friends, including those both with and without scholarships, possessed two fascinating qualities: first, the ability, collectively, to meet any arbitrary standard of success—academic, athletic, financial… but also, the understanding that there was more to life than meeting arbitrary standards of success. Through their outstanding self-motivation, my classmates have encouraged me to make the most of myself—but through their philosophical open-mindedness, my classmates have taught me that nothing can increase or decrease a person’s inherent value. And that is a life lesson worth learning.
All in all, I want to thank all of you—the donors, the administrators, the professors—who have engineered the Carolina Scholars Program. You saved me, I think, from debt; you taught me to think twice about the significance of ivy-league-style prestige; and you saved me from some very cold, wet nights in New Haven without my friends here at Carolina. I hope you keep this program going for a long, long time.
Mary Small: Thank you very much for that kind introduction.
I want to begin by saying congratulations. To all the students, congratulations for being selected to be a Carolina scholar. To the seniors, congratulations on completing the Scholar Program; congratulations on your upcoming graduation.
To the donors, faculty and administration, congratulations for the degree to which our accomplishments are because of you. When its all said and done, the things we are up to during our four years here end up on our resume, but if we take a moment to think back with any degree of humility and frankly, any dose of reality, we are confronted by the fact that our accomplishments, the opportunities that we’ve been given and the ways in which we’ve struggled and learned are the result of the cooperation, encouragement and support of many, many others.
For myself the Carolina Scholars Program has been a source of several of those people. Those enabling forces in out lives.
For many of us, the scholarship is also the reason we are here. I have clear memories of sitting on the couch with my parents in the spring of 2004 with a stack of acceptance and scholarship letters in my hand, trying to hammer out a decision. I remember the discussion about school loans and about how many siblings I had coming behind me. And I remember the moment when I realized that UNC and the Carolina Scholars Program, hands down, made the most sense.
But that’s not all. The Program didn’t just get us here; it also did something with us once we arrived.
Scholarship programs have the potential to be isolated, insular, turned inward on themselves to create a community within a protected bubble.
One of the strengths of the Carolina Scholars Program is that it doesn’t seek to do this. It doesn’t try to disconnect us from the rest of the campus; on the contrary, it enables us to connect more fully. At least in my experience, the Carolina Scholars Program has provided a set of resources and a launching pad off of which to use them.
From the session that oriented all of us to campus in the Fall of 2005 to the advisors that we received to the scholars groups into which we were all placed to the scholars committees that make it their business to bring content-rich, thought-provoking issues forums to campus each Fall, the Carolina Scholars Program has been a significant part of the framework of our time here at UNC.
I also echo Nitin is saying that some of my closest friends and most significant and influential advisors and mentors can be traced back to this Program.
Their advice and support are largely responsible for giving me the confidence to start an organization on campus—Extended Disaster Relief—in the fall of my sophomore year, to study abroad in Southeast Asia and then Ecuador and, most recently, to teach 17 fantastic undergraduates in a course here at UNC through the C-START program.
Through the Scholars Program, we’ve met people, we’ve met ideas and we’ve met opportunities. After we leave Carolina, I hope we remember the structure of this program.
I hope we remember not to stay within closed communities of similarly accomplished people.
I hope we remember that we aren’t defined or boxed in by the opportunities we’re given; they are just first steps. I hope we don’t ever believe that what we’re handed in enough, that we don’t have to keep striving forward.
I hope opportunities like the Carolina Scholars Program make us not complacent but enabled and empowered.
And I hope that we leave Carolina and go out into the world to make one another, as co-scholars, our professors, our donors, and all the others who participated in our growth and success proud.
Thank you.
