The Keeper of the Dream Scholarship Award recognizes outstanding students who understand and embody Martin Luther King Jr’s message on interracial understanding. While she often saw past recipients as superheroes for the work they’ve accomplished, Thy Hoang, a junior double majoring in clinical diagnostic sciences and studio art, climbed to the same rank as her student role models.
For Hoang, the making of a good recipient is someone who not only understands Dr. King’s message, but believes and applies it to the work they do.
“Anyone who wants to apply or who thinks that they’re qualified must truly believe in his message and what they themselves are doing to make America a better place,” Hoang said. “You can’t just talk the talk. You have to walk the walk.”
Despite being in multiple other competitions in the past for art contests and galleries, Hoang was thrown off by the application process for the scholarship.
“This scholarship completely threw me because it was just so honest,” Hoang said. “If I’m talking about applying my art to a gallery or a contest, then the spotlight is kind of off me, and I can just talk about my art and really sell my art in that way. With the scholarship, I was selling myself as a person.”
The Center for Multicultural Initiatives (CMI) and the Career and Life Design Center were some of Hoang’s biggest supporters on her journey, helping her with revisions on her personal statement, and even writing letters of recommendation for her. Once Hoang found out she won, the people at the Career and Life Design Center were the first to celebrate with her.
“To find out if I won the scholarship, I had to go down to the CMI and pick up a letter,” Hoang said. “I clearly thought that it was just going to be a rejection, so I opened it outside of the office, and I instantly started crying because I found out that I won it. I was walking, and I had to walk past the Career and Life Design Center, so I decided to stop in there, and I saw one of the people who helped me with my personal statement, and I saw my letter of recommendation person, and I was still crying. They just hugged me, and said they were proud of me.”
After finishing her bachelor’s degree, Hoang plans on balancing both sides of her degrees, being a clinician and being an artist, with the hopes of one day merging them, and becoming a medical illustrator, a profession consisting of roughly 2,000 people in the world.
“Being a Keeper of the Dream isn’t something that just lasts for just your college years or just for the year that you want it. It is something that you carry on with you in the future,” Hoang said. “I’m so proud to represent Asian-American women, people whose families came here for a better life, because that’s truly what Dr. King was speaking about.”
Students interested in the Keeper of the Dream Scholarship Award can visit the Center for Multicultural Initiatives (CMI) webpage for information on past recipients and how to apply.
