Bernadette May-Beaver 94C 98T
I was 17 years old when a single phone call changed the course of my future. It was around 7:00 p.m. on a Sunday night and I had just returned home from a five-day Emory Scholars interview weekend. My mother answered the phone, handed the receiver to me, and I heard a voice on the other side congratulating me for receiving the Woodruff, Emory’s premiere four year, full tuition, room and board scholarship.
Even today, exactly 30 years later, I can remember the range of emotions I felt that night. It was like I'd been holding my breath for four years in high school, worrying and wondering how I could make it through college without either going into massive debt or consigning my aging parents to a longer road ahead in their working-class and middle-class jobs. After that phone call, I was able to exhale.
Another phone call from those days also sticks out in my mind. It was fall semester, freshman year, and I picked up the phone in my dorm room on the second floor of McTyeire to call a political science professor on his office line. I had been looking in the course catalogue and saw a class - “Twentieth Century Political Ideologies” - that I really wanted to take. However, it was an upper level class with a prerequisite I had not yet fulfilled.
Little did I know back then that when I picked up the phone to ask about my options, the professor who answered would not only become my undergraduate mentor but my lifelong friend. I don't know why Dr. Harvey Klehr allowed me into his class that semester, but I can't help but think that my Woodruff Scholarship opened the door a little bit. In my senior year, I would also get to know Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, serving eventually as her teaching assistant. Would I have gotten that position without having been a Woodruff Scholar? I don’t know. But I know it didn’t hurt.
So that's what the Woodruff scholarship did for me initially: it gave my parents and me some breathing room and it opened the door to classes that would lead to my lifelong interest in the confluence of politics and religion. It also gave me tremendous freedom. Midway through my freshman year, I discovered that the Woodruff would allow me to overload on classes. I never took fewer than five classes a semester after that. And I chose my classes based on pure interest, without worrying about what their “return on investment” might look like. The Woodruff Scholarship program gave me more freedom in four short years than most people are offered in a lifetime.
I could end this essay with a reflection on the third time that a phone call from the Woodruff Endowment changed the course of my life. And indeed, I’ll never forget the voice on the other end of a phone call, five years later, congratulating me on winning another Woodruff scholarship to study at Candler School of Theology, which allowed me another three years of discovery, opportunity, and freedom. But the impact of the Woodruff scholarship didn't end once I left Emory - not by a long shot.
The truth is that I still feel its impact in my life today. I feel it every time I pick up the phone to call my lifelong best friend, Lorri. Like me, Lorri Hewett won an undergraduate Woodruff Scholarship in 1990. Shortly thereafter, she published her first (but not last) award-winning YA novel. We lived together and traveled the world together in our twenties (another luxury that our debt-free post-college life afforded us), and then we both decided to “pay it forward” by building parallel careers as high school teachers here in Atlanta.
And if past is prologue, then I can say with confidence that when we get together at summer’s end to celebrate our 48th birthdays, we will laugh, we will talk too loudly, we will bemoan the dismal state of our divided world, and we will, always and inevitably, reminisce fondly about our youthful days at our beloved alma mater. I will never forget what the Woodruff Scholarship did for us, and I will always be grateful for its outsize impact.