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Diverse New Faces for CALS
by Bill Loftus
When Erik Zavala was a boy, his mother, brother, and sister moved north from Mexico to California’s Central Valley to join his father who was harvesting cherries.
“The first night we spent as a family in the U.S. was under a cherry tree in an orchard. I remember being awakened early the next morning to the sound of voices and banging metal. The voices and all the banging came from the seasonal workers picking fruit off the cherry trees with their picking ladders,” Zavala recalled.
That was in 1995. The family settled in Wenatchee, Wash., a short time later. Zavala enrolled in fifth grade and graduated from Wenatchee High School in 2003. His leadership and work ethic so impressed his teachers that they volunteered to pay for his first quarter at Wenatchee Valley College. In 2004 he became a U.S. citizen. In 2008 he transferred to the University of Idaho’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences to study agriculture and graduate from a university.
“Erik is the type of young man who deserves whatever help you can give him,” said Ron Reeves, a Wenatchee High School teacher and coach who helped Zavala launch his college career.
Erik is one of 28 students to study in CALS in the past 14 years as beneficiaries of the USDA Multicultural Scholars Program (MSP).
CALS hits homerun with USDA scholarships for multicultural students
The success of the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences in securing support for multicultural scholars through the U.S. Department of Agriculture allowed Zavala to follow his dream to Moscow at the start of the spring 2008 semester. He was among five transfer students who benefitted from the successes of earlier multicultural scholars who graduated early, freeing up scholarship funds to double the number of students able to enroll at UI CALS in 2008.
For John Foltz, associate dean and director of the college’s academic programs, the USDA scholarships strive to replicate Zavala’s experience and bring more diversity to our nation’s agricultural and family sciences arenas.
“This program is helping us reach our goal of achieving a demographic make-up within CALS that more closely reflects that of the state of Idaho,” Foltz said. Since 1994, the college has won USDA Multicultural Scholars Program funding five times, bringing a total of $540,000 to help first-generation college students and expand student diversity on the Moscow campus.
After university, then what?
In 1997, Justin Franklin was finishing high school in Seattle and attracting scholarship offers based on his athletic talent as a football player. Then he got hurt. The scholarships vanished.
His aunt and uncle, both Idaho alums, directed him to a friend in Moscow who told him about the Multicultural Scholars Program. He applied and received a scholarship.
“It was cool because I felt like I was appreciated and people wanted me to be there,” Franklin recalled in a telephone interview. “So I was able to get my school done, and it felt like it was where I was supposed to be.”
The Multicultural Scholars Program was his ticket to Idaho and to a career. He now works for an international luxury developer overseeing operations at several private clubs and traveling to Hawaii, Mexico, and the Bahamas.
While he pursued the academic and social experiences of college, including serving as president of the Idaho chapter of Phi Beta Sigma, his injuries healed. He played football for the Vandals as a free safety and corner on the team that won the Humanitarian Bowl in 1998. He graduated in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in nutrition and dietetics.
“You might be a little out of your element, but it is still most definitely beneficial because you get your education, and you get to see a different way of life and way things are done,” Franklin said.
MSP scholars get organized support
The scholarship requires the recipients to meet several times with assigned faculty mentors and stretch beyond their comfort zones, attending and participating in conferences and college activities, Foltz said. “They often are reluctant to do these things at first, but you can definitely watch them grow and mature.
“The sharing and bonding that occurs among these students is pretty cool to watch,” Foltz added. “While they are from varied ethnic and cultural backgrounds, they understand that when they participate in a seminar, travel to a meeting, or work at an internship, not only are they helping us document that our program is succeeding—but also they are definitely growing through these experiences.”
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