The new, student-run scholarship program Vanderbilt Students for Students will meet for the third time tonight at 7:30 p.m. in the Baseball Glove Lounge.
The group is encouraging all members of the community to join, as most of its membership is now composed of cross country team members, said sophomore Rob Whiting, founder and president of Vanderbilt Students for Students.
The group, founded to help a low-income student from Nashville attend Vanderbilt, hopes to sponsor a five-kilometer road race to fund a $5,000 scholarship through entry fees.
“We want to do something like the Habitat for Humanity run, but we want to involve the entire community,” Whiting said.
The group has created a Vanderbilt Donations Committee and a Community Donations Committee so everyone within the Nashville and Vanderbilt communities has a chance to donate, said sophomore Michael Nordlund, vice president of Vanderbilt Students for Students.
“We want 50 percent of the donations to come from Vanderbilt students, faculty and alumni,” Whiting said. “We want students at Vanderbilt to be a part of this because it opens up their eyes to problems with lower incomes.”
Whiting said when he arrived on Vanderbilt’s campus as a freshman, one of the first things he noticed was a lack of socioeconomic diversity.
“When I came to Vanderbilt, it seemed like most people came from middle- to upper- class families,” he said. “I know for me, even coming from a middle-class family, it was a given that I would go to college. For a lot of students, they don’t even consider college.”
The group, which has already collected $3,000 in pledges, accepts donations in a number of ways—through textbooks, money and time.
While the group plans to focus on the financial aspect of its mission this year, it hopes to sponsor mentoring programs in the future.
“A lot of kids at lower income high schools, like Pearl-Cohn here in Nashville, have never even seen a college application,” Whiting said. “It would be great to get some first-generation students applying to college to break the cycle. We want them to consider options like the Free Application for Federal Student Aid.”
Another unique aspect of this program is that anyone who donated to the scholarship will have input on who receives it, Whiting explained.
“We want Vanderbilt to feel involved in the process,” he said. “Everyone will be actively discussing who they think should get the scholarship and why.”
Both Whiting and Nordlund said their main goal was to help students get to college.
“We want to help students in a broad way by getting them in college,” Whiting said.
The scholarship will eventually be “just one part of making Vanderbilt aware of low-income struggles,” he said.
