Deserving Duo Earns Engineering Scholarship

Two college students received a much deserved boost toward reaching their academic and career goals last month when they won the NTTA’s Jere W. Thompson, Jr. Scholarship.  Nadezhda Polyanskaya and Guillermo Ramos now can spend more time studying for exams and less time worrying about tuition.

The fund, named in honor of NTTA’s first chairman of the Board of Directors, provides scholarships to disadvantaged students in civil engineering programs at universities in Texas.  The winners also are offered paid summer internships at NTTA, HNTB Corporation, Kellogg Brown & Root, or Carter & Burgess. 

The scholarship is administered by the Dallas Foundation and is funded by NTTA fundraising events conducted since 2002.

This year’s selection marks the first time two students received the honor in recognition of today’s tough economic climate.

Polyanskaya, the first female scholarship recipient, attends Texas A&M University where she is majoring in civil engineering and expects to graduate in 2011. Polyanskaya became interested in engineering thanks to a high school organization called Architecture, Construction and Engineering (ACE).  In high school, she held several leadership positions with Science Olympiad and National Honor Society.  At Texas A&M, she plays on the tennis team and has earned local and national scholarships for academic and community excellence.

Ramos, a native of Laredo, Texas, studies Civil and Structural Engineering at Texas A&M International University.  He expects to graduate in the spring of 2011.  He was drawn to structural design because one day he would like to create complex structures such as large buildings, tunnels, dams, highways and bridges.  Among his projects in science and engineering classes was his design of a traffic light using the Petri net mathematical modeling language.
 
For more information about the Jere W. Thompson, Jr. Scholarship Fund, visit The Dallas Foundation at http://www.dallasfoundation.org/scholarship13.aspx