The decision to attend the University of Georgia is a particularly rewarding one-both academically and financially-for 21 academically outstanding incoming freshmen.
These students have been awarded four-year Foundation Fellowships, UGA’s most prestigious undergraduate scholarship. In-state students will receive an annual stipend of $9,000 in addition to the HOPE Scholarship. Out-of-state undergraduates will receive $14,000 annual scholarships and a tuition waiver.
The award also includes travel-study opportunities for study abroad, language training, internships and, increasingly, public service. Previous students have used such opportunities to travel, study and work in such places as Hungary, South Korea, Tanzania and the Galapagos Islands.
The new Foundation Fellows are: Craig Chike Akoh, Payton McCurry Bradford, Kevin Kyong Chang, Chuan Cheng, Christopher John Chiego, Rebecca Elizabeth Corey, Colleen Helen Cotton, Jordan Allen Dalton, Christina Lynn Faust, Rahmel Vaughn Fuller, William Featherstone Gilmore, Elizabeth Anne Godbey, Chadwick Parker Hume, Brittany Morgan Lee, Caitlin Marie McLaughlin, Nancy Ellen Nichols, Milner Benedict Owens, Kevin Christopher Poe, Elizabeth Anne Riggle, Paul Andrew Ruddle and Marlee Jean Waxelbaum.
Each recipient will be paired with a senior faculty mentor and an upperclass Foundation Fellow for support and guidance. During the academic year, Foundation Fellows will participate in dinner seminars in faculty members’ homes, meetings with distinguished visiting speakers and a variety of other academic and cultural enrichment activities.
“These students will have a pretty amazing array of educational opportunities,” says Steve Elliott-Gower, associate director of UGA’s Honors Program, “and they can achieve their most ambitious goals if they seize these opportunities and strategically use them to create even more opportunities. I’ve seen this done many times in the past, and it’s very impressive-even exciting.”
The Foundation Fellowship is a coveted honor with a highly competitive selection process. The average SAT score of the 2005 class is 1520. Eight fellows had perfect 800 scores on either the verbal or math portions of the SAT. The average GPA is 4.13 on a 4.0 scale, which indicates extra points for advanced placement courses. The list of their high school academic achievements and extracurricular activities is also impressive.
The scholarship recipients are enrolled in UGA’s academically rigorous Honors Program, one of the nation’s oldest and most prominent. The Honors Program enables them to work closely with faculty in their respective majors and complete research projects, which can translate into Honors thesis papers, symposium presentations or publishable journal articles.
“Foundation Fellows are not an enclave, off by themselves. Rather, they are an integral part of the overall Honors Program,” says David Williams, director of the Honors Program. “Being part of the Honors Program affords these exceptional students the opportunity to augment the fellowship in many ways, both curricular and co-curricular.”
The Fellows were selected from more than 800 applicants and 69 finalists who attended an intensive interview weekend on campus in February. The visit included participation in faculty-led seminars, social mixers with current fellows, and a round of interviews with senior faculty foundation trustees, and staff from admissions and student affairs.
