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Jack Kent Cooke Scholars Choose Pacific

The Nation's best come to Forest Grove when they could be anywhere.

Each year, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation selects 50 students with exceptional promise from two-year and community colleges across the nation for scholarships that provide funding for tuition, room and board, fees and books at the four-year institutions of their choice. Prestigious Jack Kent Cooke scholarships are among the most competitive in the nation.

Once a high school dropout, Nikki Hurtado went on to earn a 3.91 grade point average with a major in history at Portland Community College. Now she is the winner of one of the nation's most competitive scholarships.


The idea got Nikki thinking, "If I could go anywhere, where would I go?" That's when Pacific came to her attention. Nikki sought her teacher's advice and "seven out of 10 teachers told me Pacific," she recalls. So, one day, she came to Forest Grove, and "fell in love with Marsh Hall." Nikki wanted a quality education in a supportive environment, precisely what she found at Pacific. She has been impressed with the quality of Pacific's faculty and staff, describing those who work here as "patient" and "genuinely caring." She loves the beauty of the Forest Grove campus and the sense of community that she does not believe she could have found at a larger institution. The Jack Kent Cooke scholarship not only awarded her with the opportunity to continue pursuing her dreams, but has allowed her more time with her family and allowed her children to realize their own possibilities. Nikki will graduate from Pacific just weeks before her oldest son graduates high school. She intends to apply for a graduate-level scholarship through the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation that will allow her to attend Pacific's College of Education. She hopes to receive her Master's of Arts in Teaching with an English Speakers of Other Languages endorsement so that she can work with ESL students in a local school district.

 

Elizabeth Bair managed a call center for a telecom communication company and had been divorced after a 22-year- marriage when her mother in Coos Bay, Oregon suffered a stroke. She took a leave from her job to help her father take care of her mom. In doing so, she says, she become so inspired by the occupational therapist who helped her mother that she decided to go back to school and become one herself. She enrolled at Portland Community College, attending classes at the Southeast center and Cascade campus. "I actually had to start below zero," Bair says with a laugh about her community college experience, noting that she began her collegiate career with a remedial math class.

 

She apparently has caught up, having finished her first semester at Pacific this fall with a 3.92 grade point average. Bair picked Pacific because it is the only college in Oregon to offer a graduate program in occupational therapy. She is majoring in social work at Pacific and will apply to the Occupational Therapy program after two years. "If anybody told me in 1999 when I was going through divorce and career changes that I would be granted a big scholarship, I never would have believed it," she says. Bair joins two daughters also working toward college degrees.

Elizabeth and Nikki join 2006 Jack Kent Cooke scholar Jan Nerenberg, who came to Pacific University from Clatsop Community College.

When she graduates from Pacific University in 2009 with degrees in English literature and creative writing, Jan Nerenberg will be nearing what most people call retirement age. But don't call her old. Nerenberg may have had to wait 38 years to go to college, but her ambition and her energy is every bit as youthful as any other college student. She has ambitious plans beyond her bachelor degrees: first, completion of a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing here at Pacific and then teaching while continuing to pursue her writing dreams.