Western Carolina University

Departments Create Scholarships to Attract Top Students

Will Peebles leads the Gamelan Ensemble.

Members of the music department faculty recently hit just the right note of support for students at Western, orchestrating a new scholarship to help attract talented music majors to Cullowhee and digging into their own pockets to move the award from an idea to a reality. The WCU Music Faculty Scholarship, which will be awarded to an incoming freshman student for the 2007 fall semester, is just one example of the many types of giving opportunities available through the Campaign for Western.

 For music faculty members, the scholarship is simply a matter of seeing a need and acting to meet that need, said Will Peebles, department head. “It is great to see the faculty pull together to make this scholarship happen,” said Peebles. “Western’s department of music has only 25 percent of the scholarship money it needs to be competitive for the state’s top music students.”

The music faculty members aren’t the only professors who have decided to direct their gifts to help students within their own department. Faculty from the emergency medical care program also are creating a new scholarship fund for deserving students who are preparing for careers in emergency health care. “There is a huge shortage of qualified paramedics, and we want to do something to try to make it a little easier for people to get into the profession,” said Mike Hubble, director of the EMC program. “This is our small way of giving something back to our profession and to our program.”

The music and emergency medical care scholarships are both “annual” scholarships. Unlike endowed scholarships, in which the dollars awarded to students come from the interest earned from investments, annual scholarships must be replenished every year through new contributions, said Brett Woods, campus campaign director. “Every dollar raised through an annual scholarship goes directly to students to help meet the cost of their education at Western,” Woods said. “Contributions to annual scholarships are an important part of the overall private support necessary for the university to continue to meet the needs of deserving students.”