From age 8 until college, my family lived in the tiny town of Trona, CA.

Situated in the middle-of-nowhere in “Eastern California”, Trona offers nearly nothing in the way of professional career opportunities. The local chemical processing plant and largest employer in town, which changes hands every decade or so, only employs a few hundred people at this point. While the Searles Lake Mineral Company, founded in 1862, has long since dried up, the smallest, resilient community remains.

Kids who graduate from high school in this town of under 1,000 people have a big culture shock ahead for themselves. It isn’t just that integrating into the college life is hard, but also that the opportunities that living in a bigger city can afford a person are so vastly different than the “small town life”. It’s like graduating from high school in a small town, also means you graduate into a new chapter of your life, where everything you think you know about how society works has changed. For example, Trona, CA didn’t have reliable cell phone service until 10 years ago. Can you imagine that? Driving to the edge of town so you can find a hill where your may get cell service, perhaps to call back job opportunities or college recruiters. Paying for a phone that you can only use when you aren’t at home. It needlessly burdens rural kids disproportionately, both psychologically and financially. At this critical time for graduating high school kids, we are supposed to be empowering to step into a successful and focused college career.

Thank goodness, in my case, my GPA and activities like marching band, where I was 1st chair trumpet, and Volleyball, where I was co-captain of my team, won me two scholarships! That money was CRITICAL for me, making it possible to buy books and the car + gas + insurance + maintenance I needed to get back and forth between school and my 5 JOBS I had, simultaneously, during my freshman year of college.

I was the first person in my family, and only the second in my entire extended family, to go to college. I think I might still hold the record for graduating the fastest out of both sides of my family, as I plowed through and worked to graduate as fast as possible because I was on the hook for 100% of the expenses.

SANS Cyber Immersion Academy has announced a scholarship program aimed at covering expenses for kids graduating from rural high schools. If you have any control over the corporate philanthropy at your company, I encourage you to lead the charge in developing a scholarship program! You would not believe how much just $1,000 can help. With the student loan crisis at hand, a thousand dollars borrowed could turn into several thousand dollars by the time the student has paid back the loan. I have personally been paying on my loans since 2005, with a pause on my interest since September 2019, and the $11,000 or so I borrowed for my undergraduate degrees is currently at $14,000 owed with $7k paid. Go ahead and think on that math. I have paid nearly 70% of the original loan amount, and I owe 150% of the original balance. I am a word nerd, so I’m guessing at the numbers there, but what I do know is that this poor kid was saved several thousands of dollars in interest by the measly little scholarships I got my freshman year, that paid for my books, tuition, and car costs at a community college. That investment in me, changed my whole life for the better.

Way to go SANS!