Beyond Her Backyard

13 May 2015

Zavelsky.jpgAsk Alice Zavelsky ’17 which scholarships she applied for while in high school and the Illinois native hesitates then chuckles. If an application was placed in front of her, she filled it out.

Thanks, Mom.

“She’d been planning on me going to college since my sophomore,” Zavelsky says of her mother. “I’d come home and she’d have spreadsheets and calculations ready.”

Although doubtful about Carleton at first—Springfield to Northfield didn’t seem like much of a stretch—Zavelsky checked out the college’s credentials and planned a campus visit. Experiencing Carleton as a prospective student quickly convinced her that the college was special. She recalls walking into her host’s Musser Hall room and seeing the same posters and pictures that she had on her own wall at home. A stroll across campus turned into a nonstop greet-a-thon, leaving Zavelsky to exclaim, “Hey, I want to say hi to all of these people, too!”

It was time to leave Illinois. But would her family be able to pay for it? That’s where the Fritch Endowed Scholarship made all the difference. “My parents both have state jobs. They support my grandparents and my younger sister,” Zavelsky says. “The price had to be right in the sweet spot. Without the scholarship, we wouldn’t have had that.”

Immigrants from Kiev, Ukraine, Zavelsky’s parents left their home country to pursue bigger possibilities. Relocating meant starting over—“no language, no money, no anything.” She heard it from her parents often: They came to America so she could do better.

Zavelsky’s parents found their footing in Springfield, a city of about 120,000. The pair raised their daughters in a middle class neighborhood while encouraging Zavelsky to follow her own path. At Carleton, that means taking Chinese and Russian, playing rugby, and majoring in art history.

Zavelsky is grateful her mom pushed her to explore colleges beyond her own backyard. “Now that I’m here, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else,” she says. “Without Carleton, I wouldn’t be the type of person I’ve become.”

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