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Commonwealth Honors College (CHC) Dean Mari Castañeda, architecture Professor Joseph Krupczynski ’01MS, and their son, Miguel Angel Paredes ’17 have established the Castañeda, Paredes, Krupczynski Family Scholarship Endowment to support first-generation students enrolled in CHC, with preference for those majoring in theater, architecture or communication.

“Establishing this scholarship has always been a dream of ours,” says Castañeda. “We’ve been saving over time with the goal of one day creating a family scholarship that positively impacts students.”    

Each member of the family has a deep connection to UMass. Castañeda has spent more than two decades at the university in multiple roles, including dean, associate dean for equity and inclusion, and professor and chair of the communication department. Krupczynski earned his master’s degree from UMass, focused on community-based design as an architecture professor, and now leads the Office of Civic Engagement and Service-Learning. Paredes, a 2017 recipient of the 21^st Century Leader Award, says his theater studies and honors thesis experience at UMass helped set the course for his creative and professional life.  

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The endowment gives back to the departments that helped shape them, supports students who are the first in their families to attend college, and reaffirms the importance of the discipline scholarship recipients are pursuing.  

“Our departments have also been so supportive of us in our journeys, so prioritizing those majors was key,” Castañeda says. “We’re saying, thank you so much for the support you gave us. Now we want to support students from those departments as well.”  

“This scholarship represents something inherent in Latino culture—wanting to help each other,” says Paredes. “There’s this phrase I’ve been hearing a lot lately: Poner agua en los frijoles. It’s this idea of putting water in the frijoles so you can make more, share more. That’s a big framework that we have in our family and in the culture. It's something I hope this scholarship will be able to do. We’ve been able to get so much from UMass, and now we want to pour that back in and support more students.” 

For a complete story about the scholarship endowment’s establishment, visit the CHC website.