Student Profiles

Educational Opportunities, Intellectual Challenges Made Possible with Scholarships

For Tessa Simonds ’08, winning an Ansin Study Abroad Fellowship to support her time in England at Trinity College, Oxford University during junior year, is helping make a dream come-true. “I rely on scholarships to attend college,” she says. “Without them education would not be a possibility for me. My professors have helped me navigate the system and inspired me to pursue every available opportunity. In fact, they nominated me for the David and Kathleen Scott Scholarship to study at Oxford and supported me through the entire process. The Ansin award takes a bit of the edge off of my expenses as I immerse myself into another culture.”

This nontraditional Social Thought and Political Economy (STPEC) and English major came to UMass Amherst from MassBay Community College. “After high school I was accepted into several great private schools,” say Simonds who is now 24. “But there wasn’t any money. Instead, I lived on my own and worked as a secretary, a job I quickly learned lacked the intellectual challenge I needed. So, I turned to the most accessible and affordable choice for more education.”

At MassBay, Simonds found a culture of academic excellence with strong ties to “real world” applications. She was inspired and developed, as she puts it, “my community-college work ethic, which involves valuing education as a tremendous opportunity, fighting for what I believe in and relentlessly pursuing my goals.” Academically Simonds excelled, eventually earning a Community College University Scholarship, which allowed her to come to UMass Amherst.

“I can’t begin to tell you how thrilled I was to find a program like STPEC,” Simonds says. “For me, STPEC is about challenging assumptions and building analytic skills that help me attack problems and find solutions. And I love the connections between humanities and social sciences,” Simonds says, “especially on the theoretical, abstract level. STPEC’s flexibility has allowed me to incorporate many of my interests in language, voice, representation and rhetoric into my studies. I am particularly attracted to the politics of language and literature, especially how language fundamentally shapes the ‘self’ and the world. I enjoy small seminar classes with lots of discussion and debate, and because every core STPEC class is taught as a seminar, I have been right at home.”

This summer Simonds is fulfilling STPEC’s internship requirement at the National Priorities Project in Northampton, where she lives with some close friends and from where she drives one of the PVTA busses to help make ends meet. “The organization analyzes and charts federal spending on the state and local level and disseminates this information to municipalities, individuals and other organizations. I’m excited about working there because its goal is to demystify our government and create a connection to citizens—one of the first steps to creating change at the national and local levels.”

Time restrictions have always made it difficult for Simonds to totally dedicate herself to the many issues she’d like work on outside the classroom. “I’ve chosen public higher education as my big issue,” she says, “although I certainly try to have an informed opinion on many topics. I have lobbied and organized to increase funding to public higher education for the past three years. Massachusetts is 47th out of 50, andUMass Amherst is rapidly becoming unaffordable for many (I know I couldn’t afford it when I graduated from high school). We need to get organized!”

It almost goes without saying that Simonds has excelled at UMass Amherst. And she offers some words of advice to those who might feel overwhelmed by its size and scope. “Always ask around, don’t take your first ‘no’ as a final answer, get other options and opinions. Be persistent until your questions are answered. Search for a good advisor and respect his/her opinions. Be a self-starter.”

As for the future, Simonds has long considered law school as the best path to follow for public interest advocacy work. But she admits that she has started to question that plan. “I do wonder if law school is the right fit for me. But I am committed to post-secondary study, and I’ve recently become interested in international relations. I’m considering programs in Arabic language study for next summer. My mother just got her bachelor’s degree after fifteen years of taking classes part-time. Inspired by her example, I hope to take my studies to the highest level, whether it’s a JD or a PhD.”

May 31, 2006