The Lindsey Vonn Foundation awarded scholarships to 22 girls to attend iD Tech’s summer STEM programs.
This year marks the inaugural partnership between the Lindsey Vonn Foundation and iD Tech Camps, a leader in STEM education. LVF’s goal for the summer was to award scholarships to 20 girls.
Recipients have the option of attending either iD Tech’s co-ed camps or its highly successful and innovative all-girls program, called Alexa Cafe.
The iD Tech courses the recipients can enroll in include Game Design and Development, Al Lab: Robotics and Coding, Film Studio Video Production for YouTube, Make Games with Java, 3D Character Design Modeling program, Create Apps with Java, Photo Booth: Pro Photography for Instagram, Roblox Entrepreneur: Imaginative Game Design, 3D Studio: Modeling and Animation, and Python Coding.
Scholarship Selection Committee, Maris Segal, Sarah Ervin, Lydia Oxley, Paolo Bini, and executive director, Laura Kildow, sifted through 97 scholarship applications and held telephone interviews with 53 girls to determine this year’s LVF Scholarship recipients.
The process took up most of April. Lindsey Vonn then surprised 38 applicants with a video of congratulations.
“Congratulations,” Vonn recorded, ” I want to be the first person to tell you that you have officially received a Lindsey Vonn Scholarship. So proud to have you on the team and I’m really looking forward to see what you are going to accomplish in the future. We’re very impressed by you so keep it up, keep making an impact and a difference, and most importantly keep having fun.” The “reaction videos” were recorded by the kids’ parents showing the kids watching the video from Lindsey. Reactions ranged from disbelief to jumping on beds.
Scholarships were also awarded for enrichment programs that included dance camps, travel abroad, U.S. Space & Rocket center camp, youth theatre, The School of the New York Times, cycling, The New Charter University Congress of Future Medical Leaders, Rustic Pathways, University of Wyoming Summer Music Camp, Aerospace Engineering Camp at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Blue Print Summer Program for college prep.
“I am over the moon,” Laura Kildow said, “we couldn’t be happier with the progressive success the scholarship program is having. The partnership with iD Tech has been a wonderful experience. We were getting a lot of skiing and sport scholarships—which makes sense—but Lindsey wanted to do more and reach more kids with different interests. This partnership has catapulted our initiative to further impact women in STEM. It’s a lot of rewarding work to pick the winners and see their reactions but equally as hard to send out declination letters. We encourage everyone to keep applying even if they didn’t get picked this year. There are such wonderful, inspiring kids out there who deserve this scholarship. We want everyone with a dream to be able to achieve it.”
Lindsey Vonn Foundation Scholarships are awarded twice each year, in spring and fall, and winners must participate in an enrichment activity within six months of receipt of the scholarship. In order to apply for a scholarship, applicants must follow the application guidelines and apply for an amount within $5,000. Applicants can re-apply once a year, but only receive the scholarship three times total from the age of 11 to 18. For more information on the Foundation’s website, visit www.lindseyvonnfoundation.org/scholarships/.
