With the end of 2024 quickly approaching, college tuition is on the minds of many high school seniors and their families.
For Jaylin Hernandez and Austin Perny, the Lilly Endowment Community Scholarship Program has removed that anxiety.
In surprise presentations Monday morning at their high schools, Hernandez and Perny were given certificates declaring their status as newly minted Lilly Endowment Scholars.
“God is so good,” said Perny, a senior at Pendleton Heights High School. “Beyond anything, I am just so blessed to be awarded with this. It feels like years of hard work and studying have come and joined in on this moment. It made it all worth it just to be standing here.”
When looking for scholarship nominees, the Madison County Community Foundation considers a student’s academic performance, community service, extracurricular activities, responses on the application itself, and an essay.
“This is one of our favorite things we get to do,” said Ben Davis, president of the MCCF. “An award of this magnitude goes beyond helping one student and one family for one year or even four years. This can make a generational impact, especially for first-time college students. It can change a family tree.”
Hernandez has a 4.849 GPA on a 4.0 scale and will be a first-generation college student. Perny has a 4.7484 GPA on a 4.0 scale, converted from the 12-point scale Pendleton Heights High School uses. Both Perny and Hernandez are ranked second in their graduating classes and will graduate with academic honors diplomas.
Perny hopes to attend either Indiana University or Notre Dame and plans to double major in business economics and pre-law.
“I grew up in a business household and my dad is in business,” Perny said. “That is always the world I have been in. I really love the legal side and stuff like that, so joining those two together is going to be so cool.
“Going into business law, I can either specialize and get an MBA or go a JD route for my masters, so it really keeps my options open for what I want to do.”
Hernandez plans to attend Purdue University and enroll in its honors program. He wants to major in machine learning and artificial intelligence and be a part of a team at Purdue that is working to make AI which responds to human emotion. The technology, he said, has the potential to help people work through those emotions.
“As someone who is Hispanic, we do not talk about our feelings enough and we do not communicate enough with each other,” Hernandez said. “Having a robot or an AI to be able to hear you and understand you and give you feedback would be really beneficial, in my opinion, for people who do not talk about their feelings enough.”
Hernandez said he hopes he can inspire others to work hard and achieve success.
“(The scholarship) makes me feel that everything I did has been worth it,” Hernandez said. “All the academic achievements, all the background achievements I have done, and being able to make it through here, it feels very rewarding and it feels like I can be a symbol for someone.
“It feels really good to be a role model for someone in my position, because I did not have one,” he said.
This article appeared in The Herald Bulletin.