A daughter of Lebanese immigrants, Lama Bandar will be the first in her family to attend a university, thanks to the new Faculty Undergraduate Scholarship program (FUS) established by the Senate Advisory Committee on University Affairs (SACUA).
“Thank you for helping me to achieve my dreams,” Bandar, of Dearborn Heights, told faculty Senate Assembly members at their monthly meeting Dec. 8 at Palmer Commons, upon receiving the first scholarship award. Bandar said she plans a career in medicine.
The SACUA program is geared to freshmen students needing financial support. President Mary Sue Coleman’s Donor Challenge to match donations toward need-based scholarships provided a key incentive, making the first Faculty Undergraduate Scholarship award possible.
“This is an extremely important symbolic act to be supporting our students this way,” said David Potter, chair of SACUA, which established the program. “I think this is quite a unique action on the part of the University faculty.”
But with only 5 percent of faculty contributing to the FUS fund so far, supporters say broader participation is needed to create a goal of four scholarship awards per year.
To establish the FUS, 168 active and retired faculty made contributions totaling about $61,000, said Semyon Meerkov, SACUA member from 2003-06 and chair of the committee overseeing the program.
With the president’s matching funds, this created an endowment of $121,000, Meerkov said. The current fund will generate about $3,000 to $4,000 a year, but the goal is to build the endowed fund to $500,000 in order to provide bigger awards.
“The effort to create the FUS was sparked by the understanding that we don’t have enough need-based financial support for incoming freshmen,” Meerkov said.
To select student candidates for scholarships the FUS committee worked with the Office of Financial Aid, which produced a list of 10 candidates with nearly 4.0 high school grade-point averages and documented financial need by federal standards. The candidates were invited to submit an essay explaining how a U-M degree would benefit them. Based on the essays, the recipient was selected and approved by SACUA.
The $3,000 per year scholarship is renewable for four years, provided the recipient’s GPA is not below 3.0.
Meerkov said the scholarship committee plans in coming weeks to send faculty a message asking for contributions.
Donations can be made to the FUS by accessing the form at www.umich.edu/~sacua/uscholar/pledgeform.doc.
