Student Support

The Math Talent Search, sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, was established in 1963 to engage and encourage middle and high school students interested in math. The contest, which awards a $24,000 scholarship to UW–Madison, has identified young Wisconsin students who have gone on to become mathematicians or pursued careers in finance, computer science, and statistics.

The knowledge, experience, and network the Wisconsin School of Business can offer is invaluable. Your gift will help us maintain our tradition of assisting students who show financial need and academic merit.

As the very first UW-Madison Comparative Health Systems Global Pharmacy Fellow, Laurel Legenza will be participating in a groundbreaking collaboration between the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy and University of the Western Cape (UWC) in Cape Town, South Africa.

Now a member of the PIH-Engage executive board, Sarah Meiners’s passion for public health is both an extracurricular focus and a career goal.

At its heart, the Wisconsin Idea is about making the world a better place for all of the people in it, and the belief that this change can stem from what we do here every day. It is a belief that Sippl took to heart as she organized her remedy to the problem she saw. It turns out that she didn’t need to look further than her own past.

In South Africa’s fertile rolling hills, it may be difficult to envision that issues such as hunger and sustainability run rampant. But when students and professors from the UW-Madison College of Agricultural and Life Sciences (CALS) visited, that is exactly what they found. Researchers at the CALS-based Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS) are working… Read more »

Phoenix Rice-Johnson remembers growing up in Hawaii without some of the everyday amenities many of us take for granted. “My dad raised me on a mechanic’s income,” she says. “I was accustomed to poverty and unemployment in my household, because it existed throughout my community. I began thinking about a career in public service to help overcome these kinds of inequalities.” Rice-Johnson,… Read more »

UW fully funds student veterans during their first year of law school, and also creates opportunities for both veteran and non-veteran students to give back locally by working at the Veteran’s Law Center, a free walk-in legal clinic serving low-income veterans and their families.

With her small-town roots and big-campus dreams, McKenzie Capouch ’17 is not unlike many UW–Madison students. For her, home is Ettrick, Wisconsin: population 1,300. That is roughly a hundred more people than students in Witte Hall, the residence hall where Capouch spent her freshman year. “I moved in on my own, and I was a… Read more »

Growing up, Desire Smith’s closest connection to the land was shopping for produce at Wal-Mart. Born and raised in a food desert in inner city Milwaukee, she became interested in agriculture as a high school student on a visit to the school’s greenhouse and was able to get an after-school job working there.

A human ecology perspective can shape the world. When Elizabeth Doyle ’15 was an undergraduate in UW–Madison’s School of Human Ecology (SoHE), she studied community and nonprofit leadership. She showed such a passion for organizing people to improve housing, transportation, and education that she earned a Truman Scholarship — one of the nation’s most prestigious… Read more »

Scholarships lessen the financial burden on students and their families so that they can take full advantage of educational opportunities, and help the entire campus population by ensuring a diverse student body. As Dawn says, “[scholarships] allow us to ultimately make our communities, our university, and ourselves better. In some cases, they can even change the whole course of a life.”

Like a lot of graduate students in the School of Human Ecology’s (SoHE) human development and family studies program, Dave Smallen PhDx’18 wants to find a deeper understanding of how human minds and emotions work. Unlike a lot of grad students, however, he almost didn’t finish his undergraduate studies because in 2006, when he was… Read more »

Sophie Crispin could have gone to any of a number of law schools. The Ohio native looked at several in the Big Ten, but the UW offered her a scholarship. That clinched the deal. Now in her third year, Crispin has benefited from the Stearns-Shaw Scholarship, which was made possible by Denis Stearns JD’92 and… Read more »

UW–Madison students do great things, even when the cards are stack against them. Pablo Montes, a first-generation, working-class student, was dependent on aid when he transferred to UW–Madison. Once here, he was blindsided by the university’s steeper cost of living. Montes became homeless, couch-surfing among friends and unable even to get help from Wisconsin’s FoodShare… Read more »

The Wisconsin School of Business attracts a diverse student body, some with remarkable stories of struggle and accomplishment. Many of these exceptional students come to the business school not only to create a better life for themselves but also to give back. Noe Vital, Jr. BBA’15 was just such a student. He graduated with a… Read more »

Law school confirmed Cory Brewer’s desire to serve others. It may also have saved her life. As a law student, Brewer JDx’17 enrolled in the Center for Patient Partnerships (CPP), where she not only became a health-care advocate for her clients, but for herself as well. CPP is a national resource for building more effective… Read more »

Blind from birth, Yeaji Kim has considered music to be her guiding light since the age of five. Her experiences inspired Kim to pursue a career in music education and travel from South Korea to UW-Madison to earn her doctorate.

“Busy as a bee” seems like just another phrase—until you spend time tracking each tiny insect’s flight pattern. UW-Madison graduate student Jeremy Hemberger is doing just that, and he’s hoping his work will help farmers optimize crop production.