The Victors for Michigan campaign’s No. 1 theme is student support, and during the opening week of the historic campaign, students are speaking of the value of that support.
Students also weighed in on the two other key campaign themes — engaged learning and bold ideas — at a Victors for Michigan campaign event Friday at Hill Auditorium.
During the celebration’s main event, the university community and the general public heard real-life stories of how gifts boost students’ aspirations and U-M’s mission to serve the greater good.
“It was a mixture of relief and excitement all at once,” said Mariam Abdulghani of Dearborn. She was recalling the day a UPS driver came to her family’s home with a large package, announcing her Brehm Scholars Program award to attend U-M.
Now an undergraduate neuroscience student, she is among several students featured in campaign videos, some of which debuted at the Hill event. “I was one of the fortunate ones to receive a scholarship but there are still a ton of people who could use your help,” Abdulghani said.
Jaleel Salhi, also of Dearborn, an engineering and computer science student focusing on artificial intelligence machine learning, also received a Brehm Scholars Program scholarship. “It’s important to speak as a student for this campaign because it makes the issue of philanthropy more immediate to the people who hear about it,” he said.
Some students’ stories focus on the bold ideas supported by campaign gifts. Medical student Tani Shtull-Leber of Ann Arbor and Hannah Cheriyan of Farmington Hills, a junior studying biomedical engineering, work in the U-M Health System ECMO (Extracorporeal Membrane Oxygenation) lab. ECMO, developed by Dr. Robert Bartlett as an external way to introduce oxygen to a body, saved their lives as young children.
“The umbilical cord was like around my neck and my respiratory system was not really functioning. I was airlifted to Mott and was put on the ECMO machine,” Cheriyan said. Attending Michigan years later, she eventually looked up the lab.
“I realized that Dr. Bartlett was the man who made this machine that saved my life and I couldn’t believe it. It felt like coming full circle,” she said, adding ECMO is a game-changing device. “At Michigan alone we’ve saved thousands of babies; worldwide tens of thousands. It’s been a really high-impact innovation,” Cheriyan said.
“I am in the ECMO lab because I am an ECMO survivor myself,” said Shtull-Leber. He was three days old when the process saved him. “I am a 25-year-old medical student working with Dr. Bartlett, who invented the procedure,” he said. Thanks to gifts to the university, “I’m here to work on the next bold idea.”
Among students speaking out on behalf of the campaign goal of engaged learning was Michigan Law student Lexi Bond of Kalamazoo. She works in a clinical program in which third-year students take on cases involving prison convicts who maintain their innocence. Bond helped free a convict from jail after he served five years for an arson he didn’t commit.
“When you support the university, you support programs like the clinical program at the Law School and really engaging education for students,” she says.
Erin Busbee, a track athlete and anthropology major from Cleveland with a double minor in community action-social change and Spanish, went to Guatemala last summer on a four-week program that involved assessing local schools and offering suggestions to have an impact.
“You can read books all day, you can listen to lectures all day, you can take in information … but it never really gets to you until you’re engaged, until you’re really doing it,” Busbee said.
Supporting Michigan supports the opportunity to apply classroom learning to the real world. “We want as many students as possible to have that experience,” she said.
