{"id":434,"date":"2006-07-19T14:56:07","date_gmt":"2006-07-19T21:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/blog\/?p=434"},"modified":"2006-07-19T14:56:07","modified_gmt":"2006-07-19T21:56:07","slug":"demoting-quiet-scholarship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/2006\/07\/19\/demoting-quiet-scholarship\/","title":{"rendered":"Demoting quiet scholarship"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In a flash of intuition I decided to visit the J<a href=\"http:\/\/jackkentcookefoundation.org\/jkcf_web\/content.aspx?page=3525238&amp;mode=stage\" title=\"Jack Kent Cooke Foundation\">ack Kent Cooke Foundation website<\/a>  to see if they had proclaimed yet their awardees of the 2006-2007 fellowships.&nbsp; I hadn&#39;t heard anything, which the realistic side of me said was probably bad news, but I usually muzzle that side of me and throw it in a dark closet (where it is, I think, quite content).&nbsp; The optimist in me held out hope, as is its wont, and honestly didn&#39;t take it too poorly when it read, from the &quot;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.pcmag.com\/article2\/0,1759,1987232,00.asp\" title=\"PC Magazine Inside Track\">press release<\/a>&quot; issued just today (hence a flash of intuition), that I was not awarded fantastic monies to ease my way through graduate school.&nbsp; Reading on, the Foundation provided brief bios of some of the &quot;winners&quot;, and I let out an exasperated sigh.&nbsp; How was I, who had led a non-heroic life of quiet if passionate academia and subtle, local public service, how was I to compete with these &quot;heroes&quot; of service and scholarship?<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p class=\"MsoNormal\"><span>The new Jack Kent Cooke Scholars include:<\/span>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\"><span>Bess Greenberg was a college basketball star who played professionally in <\/span>Denmark<span> and <\/span>Israel<span>. While traveling the world as an athlete, she honed her photographic skills. She&#39;ll be attending the International Center of Photography in <\/span>New York<span>.<\/span>&nbsp;<\/p><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\"><span>Ted Ehnle was working in <\/span>Guatemala<span> as a Peace Corps volunteer when he found his &quot;calling.&quot;&nbsp; It was there he began teaching music to village children.&nbsp; Ted will be attending <\/span>Northwestern<span> <\/span>University<span>.<\/span>&nbsp;<\/p><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<div class=\"MsoNormal\"><span>Natacha Chough accomplished a lot in the years since she graduated from college. She&#39;s worked with NASA in preparation for the Mars Exploration program and was a Peace Corps volunteer in <\/span>Turkmenistan<span>.&nbsp; She hopes to become a NASA flight surgeon so she can enjoy her two loves &#8211; medicine and space exploration.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I mean, check out those buzzwords: &quot;traveling the world&quot;, &quot;college basketball star&quot;, &quot;Peace Corps volunteer&quot; (twice), &quot;teaching music to village children&quot;, &quot;NASA&quot;, &quot;Mars Exploration Program&quot;, and &quot;NASA flight surgeon&quot;.<\/p>\n<p>I understand, certainly, that scholarships are meant to be given to outstanding scholars in their field.&nbsp; I guess that I am, nonetheless, a little off-put in feeling like the Foundation is awarding some sort of glamorous scholarship heroism rather than those of us in a more perhaps salt-of-the-earth type job, if one that still has incredible educational and social consequence.&nbsp; This leads me, in turn, to wonder if any of the awardees are going to graduate school to study library science.&nbsp; I&#39;d love to know, but, ignorant, I&#39;d be willing to wager that none are.<\/p>\n<p>Maybe I&#39;m just a little bitter that libraries and librarians are an undervalued commodity in our society&#39;s educational and community landscapes, despite their incredible worth and potential.&nbsp; That, and I was honestly pretty excited that they might just up and give me $30k a year, both years, to get my master&#39;s degree.&nbsp; Can&#39;t blame a guy for a little disappointment there.&nbsp; I always felt I could use a few more loans, anyway &#8230;.&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>I would, though, sincerely like to congratulate the seventy-seven recipients of the Fellowship.&nbsp; Way to be, and good luck with your space exploration medicinal music-teaching photography peace corps type stuff.&nbsp; Me, I&#39;d rather be a librarian.&nbsp; Even a poor one. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In a flash of intuition I decided to visit the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation website to see if they had proclaimed yet their awardees of the 2006-2007 fellowships.&nbsp; I hadn&#39;t heard anything, which the realistic side of me said was probably bad news, but I usually muzzle that side of me and throw it in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,17,20],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ahniwa.com\/old\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}