DutchCrafters Announces Scholarship Winners

Aug. 15, 2012 - PRLog -- DutchCrafters.com, online retailer of heirloom Amish furniture, has announced the five recipients for the first annual DutchCrafters Amish Furniture Heritage Scholarship. Congratulations to Waheera Mardah, Melody Valadez, Aiman Aslam, Jenna Bontrager, and Alice Jean, who have each been granted $500 for the continued advancement of their higher education.

“My family and I appreciate this so much!” said Waheera Mardah of Bronx, New York, “It is a great feeling to know that there are people out there who believe in you so much that they are willing to provide funds toward the advancement of your education.” Waheera is a 2012 high school graduate and plans to attend the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York this fall.

Recipient Alice Jean responded to the news simply, “I’m ecstatic!” she said. “With the scholarship funds helping me pay for my undergraduate degree in Environmental Science at University of Texas at Austin, I hope to continue on to medical school and fulfill my dreams of becoming a traveling physician with Doctors Without Borders.”

The scholarship asked applicants to explain how they would draw upon their cultural heritage to shape their vocational aspirations, offer creative value to their future employer, and serve their community.

Recipient Aiman Aslam of Morristown, New Jersey, was able to reaffirm a connection with her Pakistani heritage as she divulged her plans to initiate a culturally-sensitive oral hygiene plan, oriented to Muslim traditions and practices, while recipient Melody Valadez attributed a new-found sense of curiosity for the physical world to her Native American heritage.

Aslam is attending Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey this year, studying public health and biology, and hopes to one day serve her community as a dentist. Valadez hopes her new-found curiosity will encourage and guide her along her way to a degree in physics at the University of Texas at Austin.

The final recipient, Jenna Bontrager of Goshen, Indiana, hopes to draw on her Mennonite heritage to serve her community as a teacher and a translator, helping to bridge cultural barriers. She will be attending Purdue University this fall, where she hopes to graduate with a double major in linguistics and Japanese.

For all the recipients, the financial assistance offered by the DutchCrafters Heritage Scholarship couldn’t come at a better time. In 2011 the average estimated undergraduate budget for full time students rose 5.4 percent to $21,477 at public universities. Incoming college freshmen now face some of the highest tuition fees ever. The five recipients of the DutchCrafters Amish Furniture Heritage Scholarship today find themselves one step further from the seemingly insurmountable mountain of tuition fees and costs, and one step closer to their final prize: a higher education.

This was the very first year of the DutchCrafters Amish Furniture Heritage Scholarship, the goal being to help students combine the background of their cultural heritage with the promise and potential of a strong academic foundation to better themselves, and the world. Scholarship founder and DutchCrafters CEO James Miller looks forward to the prospect of continuing the scholarship for years to come.

“We had an astounding applicant pool of over 1,200 other exceptional student applicants!” said scholarship committee member Tom Grimes. “This put the 5 frontrunners in the top 0.4%. These students should be very proud of themselves.”