USCBe Informed: News & Happenings

3 USCB Students Accepted to McNair Scholars Program

Sierra Brown, Andrea Santibanez, and Rose Van Etten have been selected by the University of South Carolina to become Ronald E. McNair Scholars. This program offers expanded faculty mentoring, research experience, and other academic opportunities. Its goal is to increase the number of PhD recipients who are first-generation students, Pell Grant eligible, or from underrepresented groups in graduate education.

Participants in the program are recognized, nationally, as high-achieving scholars and are actively recruited by graduate programs, which tend to offer them admission fee waivers, as well as incentives such as graduate assistantships and fellowships.

As McNair Scholars, Brown, Santibanez and Van Etten will participate in summer and academic year activities. Students enter the program during the spring, participate in the summer research component and, during the following academic year, continue their research projects and complete the requirements for graduate school enrollment by attending an online course. This summer, Brown, Santibanez and Van Etten will spend six weeks on the USC-Columbia campus with their cohort of McNair Scholars.

Meet USCB’s newest McNair Scholars:

Sierra Brown is a Nursing Honors student and extremely active on campus. She is Student Government Association Vice President of the Beaufort Campus; Honors Student Association Treasurer; and Legislative Director for the Student Nurses Association. Sierra was USCB’s 2021-2022 Outstanding First-Year Student of the Year.  

“I applied to the McNair program because, down the road, I hope to get my doctorate in nursing and become a family nurse practitioner,” Sierra said. “I am also hoping to build lifelong relationships with the other students in the program, since we are all in the same boat. I hope to build a foundation with the mentors to understand my research deeply.” 

Andrea Santibanez is a sophomore Psychology major from Hardeeville. She is the secretary for the Psychology Club and the Gamma Beta Phi Honor Society. USCB’s psychology faculty have been celebrating her success.

“I hope to grow connections with mentors and professors and build long-lasting relationships which will help me achieve my career goals. I will get help in preparing for graduate school —I’ll know more about what it will be like, how to prepare for it, and how to be successful,” Andrea said. “I have never been offered an opportunity like this and I am determined to make my best effort. I come from an underrepresented group with a family who did not have higher education available to them. I want to prove to myself and my family the things I can achieve.”

Rose Van Etten is an Honors Nursing sophomore. She is President of Social Media Club, an algebra tutor, a Student Life intern, and event coordinator of the Honors Student Association.

As a McNair Scholars, she is looking forward to pursuing a research topic that has personal signficance.“I hope to gain a deeper understanding of how to research a topic deeply. My topic will be Huntington's Disease, a rare disease that runs in my family. I want to expand upon how it affects people’s lives and what it was like to grow up in a family that has this disease.”