Our intern, Vanessa, in the New York Times

NICE JOB Vanessa!!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/27/nyregion/27scholarship.html?_r=1&oref=slogin



March 27, 2006
Students With Grit and Courage Are Awarded Times Scholarships
By MANNY FERNANDEZ
Some teenagers work to buy an iPod or a cellphone. Anna Umanskaya works to pay the rent.
At 18, Ms. Umanskaya has been leading a kind of double life. She is a soft-spoken, energetic student at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, a Russian-born girl with stellar grades, a love of acting and an acceptance letter from Brandeis University. Yet she is already more of an adult than many of her classmates: she is raising herself.
Ms. Umanskaya lives alone in an apartment in Brooklyn and spends much of her time after school at work, serving lattes at cafes. The bill from Con Edison on her kitchen table has her name on it. No one wakes her in the mornings to tell her to go to school. No one reminds her to turn in her English paper on the playwright Henrik Ibsen. She does all of that on her own.
Her grandmother brought her to New York from Moscow when she was 10, and she has moved from place to place ever since, living with her father in Montreal, at a group home on Staten Island, with a friend of her mother's in Brooklyn. A rocky family life eventually prompted her to live on her own.
She said she felt abandoned, but never hopeless, filling her high school days with honors classes, volunteer work with the elderly, leadership training in Manhattan, mock City Council debates, essay and poetry writing and small parts in plays.
"I had to have more," said Ms. Umanskaya, who plans to study international relations at Brandeis. "To make my dreams come true, to get into Brandeis, to be where I want for a change."
She recently added another achievement to her three-page résumé: winning a college scholarship from The New York Times.
As part of the annual program, Ms. Umanskaya and 18 other high school seniors will each receive a four-year scholarship of up to $30,000, a six-week summer job with The New York Times Company and a laptop computer. The students are also paired with a mentor from The Times and are offered advice and assistance through their college years from Roger Lehecka, an educational consultant and a former dean of students at Columbia College, Columbia University's undergraduate liberal arts school.
Nearly 1,400 students from 250 of the city's public, private and parochial high schools sent scholarship applications to the newspaper. A group of Times reporters, editors and managers picked 36 finalists, and a smaller committee selected the 19 winners.
They are, like Ms. Umanskaya, a resilient lot, chosen as much for their accomplishments inside the classroom as for their grit and courage outside it. Some have managed in a few years to settle in a new country, learn a new language and master their studies, while their parents - often just a single mother or father - struggled with bills, unemployment, family conflicts or addiction. Several of the families make less than $20,000 a year.
Another of the scholarship winners, Justin Jimenez, lived for about a year in a homeless shelter in the Bronx in 2001 after his mother lost her job. He recalled it as prisonlike: they had a curfew at night and slept in a space that was more a cubicle than a room. He did his homework on the bed. "I strove to do well academically to avoid the life that I lived," said Mr. Jimenez, 17, who now lives in an apartment in the Bronx with his mother, a clerical worker.
Mr. Jimenez receives financial aid to attend Cardinal Hayes High School, where he leads community service projects as the spiky-haired, Thoreau-reading president of the school's National Honor Society chapter. He has tutored struggling freshmen, helped the school raise money for Hurricane Katrina victims and coordinated the cleanup of a Harlem playground, all while earning the second-highest grades in the senior class.
Another winner, Sayeeda Ahsanuddin, 17, an India-born Muslim whose father runs a newsstand near Yankee Stadium, flourished in an unlikely place: an all-girls Catholic high school, Preston High School in the Bronx. There, she overcame her shyness and discovered her love of neuroscience, winning a regional Brain Bee competition last year. Her older sister, Sadia, who attends Harvard, was also a Times scholarship winner.
Vanessa Salazar has one clear memory of her father, Carlos Julio Salazar. She had tumbled down the spiral staircase at home in Cali, Colombia, when she was 3 or 4 and hurt her head, and he swept her up in his arms. He was murdered soon after, in 1990. "When I see kids playing with their fathers, I remember that my dad was like that once, that he played with me once," she said.
Mr. Salazar loved politics, and his daughter, now 18 and a senior at the New York City Lab School for Collaborative Studies in Manhattan, has become fascinated with it as well. After moving to the United States with her mother and her younger sister, she learned English, developed an interest in Republican politics and, one April, sent an e-mail message to the New York Young Republican Club, asking about an internship. She has since volunteered at the 2004 Republican National Convention in Manhattan and with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's re-election campaign.
She dreams of becoming secretary of state, and of earning enough money so her mother no longer has to sell jewelry at a small shop in Queens, where she, her 8-year-old sister, Camila, and her mother share a two-bedroom apartment. Her mother sleeps on a bed near the kitchen so each of her daughters can have her own bedroom.
"There will be a day when my mom is not going to have to lift a finger," said Ms. Salazar, who is waiting to learn if she has been accepted to Harvard. She wears a Harvard sweatshirt in the meantime. Camila wears one, too.
Soma Golden Behr, the scholarship program's director, said: "There are so many wonderful kids in New York who have enormous adversity in their lives, and who somehow manage to survive in brilliant fashion. What we want to do is help give those remarkable young people a helping hand, a boost over the fence."
The New York Times College Scholarship Program started in 1999 with six students. Since then, it has helped pay for the college educations of 160 young New Yorkers.
Past winners include Anahad O'Connor, 24, who scrapped his dreams of becoming a nuclear chemist but found something else to do after graduating from Yale. He is now a reporter for the Metro section of The Times.
Phillip Marcus, 18, a freshman at Wesleyan University, is already considering a career as a political strategist. Rebecca Deng, 24, is a media planner at an Asian American advertising agency called A Partnership. Last year, one previous winner gave back to the program, sending in two checks, each for $1,000.
The scholarships are paid for by The New York Times Company Foundation, contributions from readers and an endowment started with a grant from the Starr Foundation, a charitable group created by Cornelius Vander Starr, founder of the American International Group, the insurance company. The program also recognizes the teachers who inspired the students. A group of teachers nominated by the scholarship winners will be given $3,000 each in June, awards provided by the Charles H. Revson Foundation.