McNair Grant Offers Higher Education Opportunities

A five-year grant of $1.1 million will continue a collaboration between Ripon College, Lawrence University and St. Norbert College. The U.S. Department of Education TRIO division awarded the grant to the schools’ Ronald E. McNair Post-baccalaureate Achievement Program.

This program prepares first-generation, low-income and racially underrepresented students for graduate school and the attainment of doctorate degrees. The program, in four years, has placed 40 students in graduate schools, including Valerie Gray of Baileys Harbor.

Gray graduated from St. Norbert in 2011 and is in her second year of a Ph.D. program in physics at the College of William and Mary – Virginia.

Gray comments, “I have been able to go beyond what I thought I would be doing and go places that I wouldn’t have imagined I would get to visit. I am currently in Germany as part of a research project.”

For more information, visit mcnairscholars.com.