Student is on to her next challenge
By Tony Biasotti, tbiasotti@VenturaCountyStar.com
July 2, 2006
No one would accuse Ellen Adams of taking the easy way through anything.
When she was in middle school in Spokane, Wash., she decided that the local high schools wouldnt present enough of a challenge. She said she chose the Thacher School, a prestigious college preparatory school in Ojai, because it sounded like a great adventure.
After she graduated from Thacher with honors, she spent a year in Spain at the University of Granada.
Now 19, Adams will start her first year at Princeton University in the fall. Again, she chose the school in part for the challenge; Princeton has a rare senior thesis program for undergraduates.
Along the way, Adams ran into a whole new set of challenges that she hadnt sought out. During her senior year at Thacher, she told her parents that she was bisexual, and they stopped supporting her, financially and otherwise, she said. To pay for her Princeton education — where tuition, room and board are more than $40,000 a year — she has won a raft of scholarships. At the top of the list is the Matthew Shepard Point Scholarship, awarded last month to Adams and two other students from a pool of more than 1,300 applicants.
The scholarship is funded by the Point Foundation and the Matthew Shepard Foundation, both organizations that help gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students. Thirty students were Point Scholars this year, but only the top three were awarded the Shepard Scholarship.
The foundations dont disclose the amount of each scholarship, but the average is $12,500 of direct aid, along with mentoring and other support that brings the total to more than $33,000, Point Foundation Chairman John Pence said.
Adams said she plans to study international relations at Princetons Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Shell also study comparative literature in both Spanish and French, and, in her spare time, she might pursue a certificate in fixed-meter poetry.
I would love to be a writer, but its always good to have a fall-back plan, she said in a phone interview from a summer camp in northern Idaho, where shes working as a counselor.
At Thacher, Adams published a few literary zines — small, do-it-yourself magazines — and started a zine library on campus. She also started Thachers Gay-Straight Alliance club. Many of the other Point Scholars founded similar groups at their high schools, but few had the support that Adams said she enjoyed from teachers, administrators and fellow students.
It sounds cheesy, but the morals of the school — honor, fairness, kindness, truth — when theyre put into action, its beautiful, she said. It made for a very accepting environment. … Compared to some of the horror stories Ive heard about, I feel very lucky.
Like the rest of the scholars, Adams was picked because shes shown the potential to be a leader, Pence said.
We tend to steer away from the quiet types that had A averages, he said. There was something very, very real about her. Its one of those stories where you think someones got it made, and then theres this severance from her family.
