The Maecenas Fund > Current Newsletter

All four of our 2006 Maecenas Fund Scholars successfully finished their Freshman year at Arizona State University and are getting ready for their Sophomore year. We regard this as a substantial validation of our approach. Historically, half of the students from Carl Hayden do not make it through their Freshman year of college, regardless of the school attended.

Clearly, our Scholars are very capable people. In addition, we also believe that our involvement and the requirements we impose in return for accepting our help contributed to the students’ staying in place. I discussed these requirements in our Newsletter a year ago.
We are quickly becoming a mini-institution at Carl Hayden High School. This year, our second at the school, resulted in ten applications, up from four in our first year.

Fellow Director Chuck Bush and I visited Carl Hayden in April to do our annual applicant interviews. Before we flew to Phoenix, Chuck and I separately evaluated each of the applicants from their written applications. We did not discuss the applicants prior to interviewing them. We wanted to maintain as much individual insight into the applicants as possible before we began our decision-making process.

We began our interviews at 7:30am, and didn’t complete them until nearly four o’clock. Each of us met separately with the applicants and devoted serious time in our effort to understand each applicant as a person. In addition, we were able to squeeze in visiting with two juniors that are, in all likelihood, competing to be next year’s Valedictorian at Carl Hayden.

It was exhausting, as well as exhilarating! We were thrilled beyond measure at the quality and dedication of the students we spent the day with. Our only regret was that we lacked the resources to help all of them.

It was only after we completed our personal interviews that Chuck and I compared our notes on the written applications and the interviews. The results were remarkably similar, with only small differences in how we rank-ordered the applicants.

While our capital raising had not yet put us in a position to do so comfortably, we chose to award scholarships to five of the applicants this year. We decided that, to be true to our mission of helping to catalyze a change in attitude toward higher education in the community surrounding Carl Hayden, we needed to step up and push harder than our management backgrounds might otherwise suggest.

The personalities and ambitions of the 2007 Maecenas Fund Scholars are as broad as our society, something we value highly. Their anticipated majors are:

- Engineering (Angelica)
- Secondary Math Teaching (Yadira)
- Social Work (Giovana)
- Accounting (Cynthia)
- Forensic Chemistry (Yvette)

This is wonderful group of young women in our 2007 Class. They have brains, they have compassion, they have a wonderful sense of humor and they have drive. When I returned home after this trip, I observed that I would be proud to have any or all of these students as a daughter or granddaughter.

They certainly have earned both our support and yours.

Best regards,
Peter Gaskins
President