Simon Youth Foundation scholarship is recipient's ticket to her dreams

Selysa Marshall leaves for the trip of her dreams in May, 2012. She’s headed to Piura, Peru, as a volunteer who will teach to local students concepts like having a global mindset and virtues. It’s a chance for her to brush up on her Spanish – she wants to be a fluent
speaker – and to continue her training as a teacher.

Selysa Marshall earned a
Simon Youth Scholarship in 2010

As many people do when they achieve a long held dream, Marshall can identify definitive moments that helped her get to this point. For her, being named the recipient of a Simon Youth Community Scholarship in 2010 was one of those moments.

Marshall recently wrote to the Simon Youth Foundation Facebook page in April, 2012. In her Facebook message, she recalled the congratulations letter that SYF had sent her when it awarded her the scholarship.

“The letter said to pay it forward, and I think I will be fulfilling that soon,” Marshall wrote on Facebook in reference to her Peru trip.

In fact, Marshall, who is from Fair Oaks, Calif., has been paying it forward since she started college in the fall of 2010 as we found out when we called her after reading her Facebook post.

“I have spent my last two semesters working as a teacher’s aide in a classroom for special needs and autistic students in the San Juan Unified School District,” Marshall says. “I’m studying to be a teacher, and it has been a great opportunity to see if I want to go into the area of specialized teaching.”

Marshall, who is just 18-year-old, will already be entering her junior year of college at San Diego State University in the fall (she graduated high school a year early). At the university, she holds a 3.7 grade point average, but college had seemed out of reach until she received her Simon Youth Scholarship.

“My mother is disabled, and the scholarship was just the exact support that we needed so that I could go to school,” Marshall says. “I’d thought about college, but it wasn’t until I received the scholarship that I felt like I really needed to give it my all – you want to do well when someone puts that kind of faith in you.”

In an example of the ripple effects that SYF programs can have on families and communities, Marshall says one of her two older brothers has enrolled in college for the upcoming fall semester after seeing how her experience is shaping her future. Neither of her brothers enrolled in college after high school.

“I think that it’s important for people to make their individual choice that they want to go to college,” Marshall says. “It may not be for every person, but people that want to go should have the opportunity.”

SYF agrees. To quote Marshall’s Facebook message to us: “you’ve opened doors for me through your generous contribution.”

And SYF will continue to open as many doors as we can for as many students as our donors and supporters will allow. After all, you never know where one of those doors might lead. Maybe, Piura, Peru.