Riegle Family Scholarship

My family of four is supported by my single mother who works ten hour days yet she only manages to make around nine thousand dollars a year. We stretch that amount as much as possible throughout the year but as a result we had no money saved up to pay for my higher education. Currently, I’m living on my own, two hours away from my family, and I have to pay for everything on my own through scholarships and programs. My rent, utilities, and food costs total to about one thousand every month, and that doesn’t include any textbook or extra school fees that may come up. Last year, even though FAFSA helped me out a lot, I still had to work in order to cover the rest of my living costs. This scholarship would allow me to just focus on my studying for a month, which would prove especially useful during finals month, as I wouldn’t have to worry about balancing my work schedule and my studying schedule. The only thing I would have to worry about during that free month from work would be what the quadratic formula is, not where I’ll live if I can’t make rent this month. My financial situation has always been like this, but I was lucky enough to be introduced to the engineering field in ninth grade through my high school. I received my high school education from a career high school that had a focus on engineering. Throughout the four years at my high school, I learned about the many facets of engineering, as well as their basic tasks and what they contributed to the world. This is where I found my love for electrical engineering, especially when it came to the concepts of soldering, making breadboards, and Boolean Algebra. All of these topics were easily what I excelled at the most, and I even created a small project outside of class time with the scraps of wire that my teacher allowed me to take. When it came time to decide what universities to apply to, I sat down with my engineering teacher and I asked what career would encompass those key jobs, and he said electrical engineering. Unfortunately, even though I was accepted to most of the schools I applied for, I realized that I wouldn’t be able to go to them without massively burdening myself and my family financially. I ultimately decided to go to a community college so I could still continue my education without going into debt, and this scholarship would help me immensely with this plan.