Today’s Daily Prompt at Word Press: Ripped from the Headlines, sounded like a real challenge, something to really get my creative juices flowing, so to speak.  Here is it: Click over to whatever website you visit most frequently to get news. Find the third headline on the page. Make sure that headline is in your post.

I went over to the Projo.com (the local paper in Rhode Island) $10,000 grant endows RIC scholarship fund in honor of Viola Davis.  I thought about the prompt all afternoon, not entirely sure of what to write about today.  I’ve landed on the grant and scholarship piece of the headline.  I’m familiar with grants, writing for them, researching them, receiving them.  Grants have made my world go around since…I went to college.

Going to college, even in 1981, was expensive.  I used to say that I “paid my own way” through college, which is partly true.  But thanks to the good people of the United States, I received grants–lots of grants.  The linchpin to the successful funding of my education was the Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grant (FSEOG).  The FSEOG is a grant for undergraduate students with exceptional financial need.  I certainly fit that bill (no pun intended).

My college experience was amazing.  I made the most of it; I was an RA, on the orientation staff, class president, had lots of friends, and tremendous memories to last a lifetime.  I could not have been as successful as I have been without the college degree and I couldn’t have made it through college with grants. In fact my grants totaled more than $10,000 over four years!