News
DYNAMO, says the Webster's entry, means "a forceful, energetic individual." There isn't a picture of Caressa Sims in the dictionary, but there could be.
Sims '08 caught fire her junior year at Portland's Jefferson High School. A mediocre student until that point, she decided that she wanted to attend college. As the first in her family to aspire to higher education, she knew she would have to get there on her own. "I didn't have one penny for school," she says. Sims immersed herself in her studies, earning straight A's her last two years at Jefferson.
But Sims, realizing she needed scholarships to afford college, knew it would take more than a couple of years of good grades to qualify. So she threw herself into athletics, hoping to garner a scholarship. Track seemed the easiest to learn, so she willed herself to become a sprinter.
Her plan worked. Sims was accepted to nine schools and offered several athletic scholarships. She chose Portland State in part because the University offered her the Jane Morrow Scholarship for athletics and the Goodman Scholarship for academics. She went on to earn other scholarships at PSU, including the Les Fahey/KPMG Scholarship and the Levin/Fowler Scholarship. This last gift came with a surprise: personal help and encouragement from the donor couple, Irving Levin and Stephanie Fowler (see accompanying story below).
Once at PSU, Sims pursued a major in business accounting because, she says, the subject was so difficult. "I wanted something I could stay interested in," she says. "I read every textbook cover to cover. I didn't want to just get good grades, I wanted to know the material."
She also made the track and field team, first as a sprinter, but switching to hammer and shot put on the advice of her coaches. It was good advice. After a stellar throwing career at PSU—including setting PSU records for shot put and hammer throw and being named Big Sky Conference champion for two years—Sims is working on qualifying for the 2012 Olympics. Although track kept her "busy beyond full time," Sims also found time to mentor athletes, serve two years as team captain, and volunteer at track and field activities
AFTER GRADUATION, Sims landed her dream job working at the Boeing Company's Portland fabrication manufacturing facility, where she had shined as a student intern. Sims is a supply chain management analyst coordinating materials from suppliers to workers on the shop floor.
"I make sure suppliers understand the needs of our manufacturing and industrial engineers," explains Sims, "and then I check the quality of delivered products and take care of problems if there are any."
Boeing allows Sims to begin work at 5:15 a.m. so she can spend afternoons training for the Olympics with Mac Wilkins, former Olympic gold and silver medalist in the discus.
Sims has three sisters who have now followed her footsteps into college, and she's ready to tackle her next goal—earning a master's degree while working full time and training two to three hours a day for the Olympics.
"I'm just excited about life," says Sims. "I have my degree. I feel I could do anything."
[Photo by Steve Brenner]
A gift to make it happen
IN TOUGH economic times, scholarships can make all the difference for students.
Caressa Sims's Portland State degree was made possible by her own hard work and several scholarships, including the Irving Levin/Stephanie Fowler Scholarship for PSU students who are the first in their families to attend college. Currently, 26 students receive funds from the scholarship.
What's unusual about the scholarship is the interest Levin (pictured at left with Fowler and Sims) and Fowler take in the students. The couple—he is chairman and CEO of Genesis Financial Solutions, Inc., and she is a journalist and psychotherapist—meet with the students at least once a term and take a personal interest in their success. They have provided tutors, internships, and in one case, speech therapy for the students.
"In a very specific sense," says Fowler, "we become the parent they didn't have, a parent who went to college. It's fun. They're an amazing group of kids."
One such student, Ruth Gathoni Mburu, a native of Kenya, depends on scholarships since most of her family has been dislocated from its home and livelihood by gang warfare.
Mburu is pursuing a career in medicine because of a young boy she used to see daily near her Nairobi high school, a boy who had acute epilepsy and had been abandoned. "I'm moved to action and know I have an obligation to the helpless," she wrote in her scholarship application.
Yekaterina Karankevich also is pursing a career in health sciences. Karankevich, a Russian immigrant now from Alaska, supported her family beginning in the ninth grade by working two jobs after school. Nonetheless, she earned good grades.
"I have a passion to prove that I can give myself an education," she wrote, "that I can succeed where others have given up."