The Aria Rutkowski Nursing Scholarship: What happens now, and how it works.

On Friday we met with Frank from USU to go over our scholarship contract!  Frank is, and will forever be, our contact there for all our interactions with them.  It was so exciting to meet with him to get things finalized!  Neither of us has any tie to USU so I know it seems kind of random, but we felt like that was the best choice for what we wanted to accomplish.  Michael did a lot of research and made a lot of phone calls before settling on Utah State for the scholarship.  The timing works out well for them too - apparently up until now their nursing program has been tied to Weber, but this year they split off.  Which means that they had to divide funding.  On top of that, they are trying to triple the amount of students they can accept into the nursing program each year because right now they can only accept about 3% of the applications they receive each year.  They are trying to expand their program to help prepare for the upcoming extreme nursing shortage forecasted for the year 2020.

Our meeting with Frank just really helped to cement our decision.  There were just so many little things that called to us.  For starters, Frank's daughter happens to be a nurse at Primary Children's!  So he hears the stories and understands our passion.  Also, the Emma Eccles Jones college at USU (which houses the nursing program) focuses on early childhood - how perfect since this is a tribute to our little girl.  Then, today while looking through the paperwork he gave us, I stumbled across a brochure detailing a new program USU has called Aggies Elevated.  It's a program for students with disabilities, the only one of its kind in Utah.  So perfect.

The scholarship endowment lasts in perpetuity.  What this means is that the scholarship NEVER ENDS.  USU takes the initial investment amount and puts it into an interest-earning account.  Each year, the earned interest is what is dispensed to the scholarship recipient.  We can add to the base amount at any time in order to increase the interest amount.  Right now there's enough for one scholarship a year.  Obviously we'd love to add to it over the years so that we can have more scholarships granted.

We are making the final touches on the contract then will turn that in within the next couple days.  If we want the scholarship to begin next year, we have to have everything done by November.  Thanks to all the wonderful people who contributed to the GoFundMe account, this is no problem!  All we have to do is make up the cost difference from our own savings and write them a check.  Students can apply for the scholarship in January, and in February a scholarship committee will choose a winner.  The scholarship committee will be made of people from the nursing college, who will choose a winner based on the criteria we have outlined in our contract.  The criteria is entirely up to us.  Isn't that cool?

So far these are the criteria we have in place:
1.  Student must be in their junior or senior year of school (firmly invested in the nursing program)
2.  Student must display a measure of empathy above that expected of a nurse (hard to measure, but will be assessed from things like their service hours and their personal essay)
3.  Student shows some financial need.

So a winner is chosen in February.  Then in April is an awards ceremony where donors are invited to present their scholarships to the recipients!  Then at the beginning of the fall semester is a dinner that all the donors and recipients are invited to in order to have a chance to meet again and really discuss the background to the scholarships.  We had no idea about those last two things, we thought the scholarship would be just a quiet, online affair.  How cool that every year we will get to talk with the scholarship winners and share Aria's story with them.  Hopefully it will inspire them as they begin their nursing careers.