Hidalgo students win coveted Gates Scholarship

By NEAL MORTON
The Monitor

Several area high school seniors joined an ever-lengthening list of Hidalgo County students who have the prestigious and lucrative Gates Millennium Scholarship to fund their college pursuits.
This year’s batch of local Gates Scholars beat out 29,000 applicants from across the United States, with just, 1,000 selected recipients winning up to $250,000 in scholarship money to cover undergraduate, graduate and doctorate school.
“I found out on Easter Sunday (and) took about five minutes to let it sink in,” said Brendon Alvarez, from Edcouch-Elsa High School. “Those five minutes were very solemn, very sobering moments.
“At certain points of the day I was almost driven to tears,” the 18-year-old added. “I was overwhelmed by it all, just overwhelmed with appreciation.”
Like the area’s other winners, Alvarez had to write eight 1,300-word essays after a nominator and recommender began the application process.
The essay prompts covered a range of topics, including the students’ most rewarding class, most difficult challenge in school and long-term educational goals.
“My end game, my dream, my wish is to open up a practice that does case work for cases involved children, pro bono, free of charge,” said Alvarez, who plans to attend Texas A&M University’s business school before moving onto law school.”
More than 15,000 students have received the Millennium Scholarship since its creation in 1999, according to the United Negro College Fund, which administers the program in combination with other education groups.
The program is well-known for a high graduation rate, with a six-year rate of 90 percent. That’s double the national graduation rate of 45 percent for all students.
Aleyda Solis, a senior at Pharr-San Juan-Alamo Memorial High, said she expects the scholarship to help her graduate more easily once she arrives at Texas A&M University this fall.
“Oh, absolutely it will be a motivation to push me to keep going,” she said. “The opportunity was great to receive it in the first place.”
She hopes to study biology, possibly heading into the medical field in the future.
Until she reaches that point, though, Solis wanted to thank the people who helped get her the large scholarship.
“I was just so very surprised and very thankful,” she said. “Without my parents always being supportive and my teachers have always been behind me, it’d be a harder way to get to college.”