Ellen B. Hazzard Nursing Scholarship Promotes Equity in Professional Nursing and Public Health

May 14, 2021

“As the first person to go to college in my family, I’ve come to realize the value and privilege of being able to receive a college education,” says Jaza Amchok ’23, sophomore professional nursing major in UVM’s College of Nursing and Health Sciences, and current recipient of the Ellen B. Hazzard Nursing Scholarship. While Jaza was raised in New York City, her parents were born in a rural area of Tibet with no hospitals nearby and no access to health care. Amchok says one of her goals following graduation from UVM will be to visit Tibet for the first time and use her new expertise to help the people in her parents’ village who don’t have access to immediate medical care. Ellen Hazzard, who earned her professional nursing degree from UVM in 1960, established the Hazzard Nursing Scholarship in 2017 to support students in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences who help to advance the College’s goal of creating a diverse community. After graduating from UVM, Hazzard became a head nurse in pediatrics and earned a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins. As a nurse, Hazzard says one of the most notable inequities she has observed over the years is the disparity in public health across the globe. Jaza Amchok says this gap in access to care is what called her into the nursing profession in the first place.

For the Love of Learning: Douglas Smith ’85 and Stephanie Ellis-Smith Establish Scholarship Fund for UVM Students Studying the Humanities

November 20, 2020

At a time when students and their parents are looking to institutions of higher education for the highest immediate return on investment—and selecting fields of study accordingly—one donor couple is helping to ensure that students can still afford to pursue their passions with a major in the humanities. Douglas Smith ’85 and Stephanie Ellis-Smith have established the Rockhaven Scholarship Fund to benefit undergraduate students from Vermont with financial need and academic merit who are pursuing a degree in the humanities. The commitment represents the largest gift to endowed scholarship for students in the humanities in the history of the College of Arts and Sciences. “Both Stephanie and I worry that there's been this huge shift in how people conceive of education as more vocational training than a broader educational exploration of what it means to be human, what it means to know this world that we inhabit and how it got this way—a much broader, deeper understanding of what education's goal and purpose should be. That said, we recognize that higher education gets more and more expensive. It gets more and more out of reach for a lot of people.”

Bradford Proud: Scholarship Funds Students from Alumna’s Hometown

November 18, 2020

Harriet Pratt Peterson ’52 passed the days of her youth in Bradford, Vermont helping out around the family farm. Her grandfather was known throughout the area as the “King of Strawberries,” and to save money for college, Peterson spent her summers knelt down in the fertile clay of the Lower Plain picking the sweet, red berries that had put Bradford on the map. When she set off for UVM, as her mother had done in 1923, she was relieved to receive scholarship support to help cover the remainder of the costs. In an effort to return the favor, Peterson has established a $1 million scholarship fund in memory of her mother. As an enduring legacy of the Pratt women who left the farm for bustling Burlington, the Margaret Jenkins Pratt Scholarship provides support to women from Bradford who wish to enroll at UVM and further their studies. The inaugural recipient, Jessie Daigle ’22, was both surprised and relieved to receive the scholarship, just in the nick of time.