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June 2021 - Scholarship Presentation and Benefit Dinner Dance
2016 Scholarship Recipient Comments
Hello everyone and good evening. It feels so wonderful to finally be gathered together for this long-awaited reunion of honoring Kevin’s legacy. Tonight marks a milestone in a number of ways - not only is this the 25th year the Eidt Scholarship has been awarded at Norwalk High School but it is also most likely the first time many of us have been able to gather in this capacity since the start of the pandemic. I am deeply honored to be commemorating both of these occasions with you all tonight.
It is surreal to remember standing here 5 years ago as a bright-eyed high school senior whose dream of attending Georgetown University had just come true. I am so grateful to be here celebrating the ways in which this extraordinary scholarship continues to change the lives of dedicated scholars and families in our community. And I am especially grateful to be able to share how this scholarship has significantly impacted the past 5 years of my own life.
I still remember the giddiness inside my chest after receiving the selection committee’s infamous phone call. I recall the conflicting pride and disbelief that my efforts in high school had amounted to something as meaningful as this scholarship. That I would now be associated with a legacy much greater than myself and be connected to a line of recipients whose collective accomplishments continue to emulate Kevin’s spirit and inspire my own. It was as much an overwhelming honor then as it is right now.
It is through the continued support of the Eidt family, selection committee members, gracious donors, and the Norwalk High School community that this scholarship persists in affording one exceptional high school senior an opportunity as great and as rare as this one every year. To all donors and supporters of Kevin’s Fund, thank you for your consistent investment in the future. Thank you for allowing me to attend the school of my dreams. Thank you for helping me begin my adult life unscathed by the weight of loans that plague so many young people today. Words will never be enough to convey the collective impact this scholarship has made on our community for the past quarter century.
My time at Georgetown was everything I hoped it would be. Thanks to the Eidt Scholarship, choosing Georgetown was not a financial matter but rather a magnetic pull of promise. Although my pursuit of study may have changed once… or twice… or perhaps even three times, I am proud to say I graduated cum laude last Spring with a major in Justice and Peace Studies concentrating in bioethics, as well as a double minor in cognitive science and Spanish. You could say I took the liberal arts approach of exploration quite seriously.
In retrospect, entering college with any concrete idea of my future was like being Jackson Pollock with a sketchbook. Both woefully premature guesses into an utterly unpredictable canvas, or future. My college experience was fortunately full of just that. I entered Georgetown interested in the mechanics of language, seeking to attain fluency in Spanish and study linguistics after many dedicated years of practice in Ms. Todeschini’s classroom. The Spanish department at Georgetown became a second home and piqued my interests in art, culture and literature. I managed to survive several graduate level courses where I encountered some of my favorite writers to date. A class on Jorge Luis Borges inspired me to apply to an exchange program in his home city of Buenos Aires. I spent 6 months directly matriculating into the argentine classroom, sipping mate in parks, perusing art galleries with local friends, and refining my Spanish, or rather Castellano, to attain fluency. It was a dream to say the least.
Another much more surprising second home to me at Georgetown was the science laboratory. As a high school student who never even fathomed taking an AP science course, you could imagine my own disbelief when my neuroscience professor asked me to join his research team after presenting my final project on the neurophilosophy of the self my sophomore Fall. I continued as a research assistant at the Georgetown Laboratory for Relational Cognition for the remainder of my college career and even conducted an Honors Senior Thesis in my lab, where I designed a comparative study on creativity anxiety between classical and jazz musicians. This study would become a fusion of my earlier orchestra career with Ms. Burkhalter combined with my newfound passion for all things cognitive science at Georgetown. My love for neuroscience now rivals my love for Spanish. And for anyone who knew me in high school, that is a deep love.
While my experience at Georgetown was deeply fulfilling in countless ways, there were so many more enriching moments that happened outside the classroom. Throughout my years, I participated in a number of social justice programs in D.C., from tutoring to mentoring to advocacy. These experiences, coupled with my studies centered around social justice, inspired me to apply to the Teach For America program. I’m proud to say I’m now an AmeriCorps member where I teach 7th grade science and social studies at a Title I school just outside of Phoenix, Arizona. Teaching so far has been as great a challenge as it has been a gift. While teaching full-time, I am also concurrently earning my Master’s in secondary education through Arizona State University, where I will graduate from next Spring.
In reflecting on the past 5 years, I can clearly see how my receipt of the Eidt Scholarship has transformed my trajectory. I entered Georgetown with an unabashed sense of freedom - both financially and academically. My winding evolution of interests took me out of Ms. T’s Spanish class and into the streets of Buenos Aires. The money I saved working during college helped support an additional 5 weeks of backpacking South America, where I traveled from Argentina up to Colombia and realized a deeper sense of purpose behind my bilingualism. The beauty of cross-cultural connection and ease of communication instilled in me a need to keep up my Spanish in the States, which in many ways led me to serve the Spanish-speaking community I am now a part of in Arizona.
Early lessons of what it means to be of service came straight from Mr. O’Donnell inside the walls of the Career Center for B.R.O.W.N., (Bears Reaching Out Within Norwalk), community service club meetings. During college, I then made my way into D.C. classrooms to mentor underprivileged youth. Now, I will watch my first group of students from my own classroom get promoted to high school this coming school year.
In looking towards the future, I am proud to recognize that Kevin’s character continues to influence my effort to create an impact. The values that this scholarship holds - deepening community, offering opportunity, and celebrating service, to name just a few - have become intrinsic parts of both my character and my classroom as I strive to embody Kevin’s legacy. It is my hope that my own students leave my classroom with a sense of Kevin’s essence through the ways in which I aim to uphold the tenets of his legacy in my everyday life.
To each and every supporter of Kevin’s Fund here tonight, your ongoing effort at keeping Kevin’s memory alive through this Scholarship has transformed the lives of so many members of the Norwalk community. My story is a small drop in the ocean of impact that this Scholarship has made and continues to make. Kevin has become a unifying light that inspires us all to pay it forward and it is the greatest honor to welcome our newest member into our community tonight. I can’t wait to hear your reflections in another five years' time and commemorate Kevin’s enduring legacy that we are all fortunate enough to be a part of.
Thank you.
Background
The Kevin M. Eidt Memorial Scholarship Fund was established through the generosity of the many people Kevin touched in his short life. Kevin, an 18-year-old dean's list freshman in the honors program at Boston College, passed away from cardiac arrest on January 23, 1997 while playing intramural basketball. Kevin set the example of the passion and sincerity we should bring to each day. He was an individual with vision, commitment, abiding hope, aspirations, and compassion. And when we look back, it was a life, albeit a glimpse of life, by which people can be measured and judged by.
Mission
The mission of the Kevin M. Eidt Memorial Scholarship Fund is to preserve Kevin's spirit by paying tribute to achievements in academics, athletics, arts, and the virtues of service and faith that were the essence of Kevin's life.
Fund Facts
With 12 scholarships, valued at $160,500, awarded to the class of 2023, Kevin's Fund will have provided $2.7 Million in financial support to 222 exemplary young men and women matriculating at over 85 diverse colleges and universities in Kevin's memory. The dramatic growth in scholarship awards is directly related to the financial success of our annual benefit dinner dance, which began in 2000 and funded scholarships for the class of 2001. As a result of this generosity, Kevin's Fund has awarded the following scholarships.
To the class of 1997 $3,750 To the class of 1998 $5,000 To the class of 1999 $12,000 To the class of 2000 $13,000 To the class of 2001 $47,000 To the class of 2002 $55,000 To the class of 2003 $70,000 To the class of 2004 $85,000 To the class of 2005 $100,000 To the class of 2006 $111,000 To the class of 2007 $127,000 To the class of 2008 $139,000 To the class of 2009 $140,000 To the class of 2010 $118,000 To the class of 2011 $117,000 To the class of 2012 $115,000 To the class of 2013 $121,000 To the class of 2014 $122,000 To the class of 2015 $124,000 To the class of 2016 $122,250 To the class of 2017 $124,000 To the class of 2018 $127,000 To the class of 2019 $128,000 To the class of 2020 $128,000 To the class of 2021 $126,500 To the class of 2022 $156,000 To the class of 2023 $160,500
For the 2023 – 2024 academic year, Kevin’s Fund is providing financial support to 15 students matriculating at American University, Boston College (2), Champlain College, Columbia, Dartmouth, George Washington University, Liberty, Northeastern, Sacred Heart, Southern Connecticut State, UConn (2), Univeristy of Delaware, and UMass-Amherst.
| Scholarship Fund Accomplishments as of June 30, 2023 | |
| Recipients | 222 |
| Awards | $2,700,000 |
| Funding as % of Contributions | 99.5% |