Nature & Nurture | Giving
Students who benefit, donors who care: The people behind financial aid
by Laura Ertel
Kerry Williams will graduate from the Nicholas School’s Master
of Environmental Management program in the environmental
health and security track this May. Back when she was looking at
graduate schools, she checked out both environment and public
health schools that offered environmental health concentrations.
Out of all those schools, the Nicholas School was the only one
to offer her a financial aid package.
“The Nicholas School was a great choice for me, because Duke has a wide range of resources available to its students, through not only the Nicholas School, but also the other graduate schools on campus. I was even able to take classes at the UNC School of Public Health and through inter-institutional enrollment. The Children’s Environmental Health Initiative here at the Nicholas School also made Duke attractive since its research corresponds to my career interests. Those things, coupled with the fact that they had offered me some money, were key in determining what school to choose. The aid helped take some of the financial pressure off me so I could focus more on my studies than on finding extra jobs to help pay off some of my loans.”
For Williams, a Fairfax, Va., native who made it through her undergraduate studies at James Madison University without loans, the Stafford loans she took out to make her graduate studies possible comprise her first debt. As she explores post-graduation career options in the field of children’s environmental health, she has vowed not to take money into account in looking for a job. “I’m looking for something that strikes my interest and not putting money as the first issue in what kind of job I take.”
The financial aid award Williams is receiving from the Nicholas School has come from the Muchnic Foundation Fellowship Endowment. In 1993, Dr. Anne Brownson Mize, a Duke University graduate who is a program officer for her family’s foundation, convinced her family to endow a fellowship at the Nicholas School.
“Over the years, I have become an environmentalist as my avocation,” says the psychologist. “I am on the board of the African Wildlife Foundation and I do a lot of work in Africa. I was thrilled when the Nicholas School was established at Duke, and I am delighted at the incredible environmental research that the school has been doing all these years, particularly regarding issues that, for me, are so critical: marine and coastal degradation, sustainable energy and global warming.”
The Muchnic Foundation contributes to the fellowship endowment each year. Mize, who has worked with staff from a variety of environmental organizations all over the world, hopes that the fellowship “will add to that pool of educated, committed, wise environmental activists, researchers and conservationists. Whatever role you play in preserving the planet, the more hard science you have to support your work, the more effective you will be.”
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