School of Education scholar Shameeka M. Wilson ’18, ’20 MEd established an endowment at UNCG in 2019 as she was finishing her master’s program. Her first scholarship was awarded in 2020.
This eastern North Carolina native created the Shameeka Monay Wilson Legacy in Furthering Education (LIFE) Endowed Scholarship in Education to honor her mother and grandmother, and her own successful path to a career in education, teaching Deaf students and multilingual learners with disabilities.
Wilson praises UNCG for showing her the way to a career focused on helping others in a UNCG “Find Your Way Here” video. “The vibe here at UNCG is the best,” she says. “Everybody is working hard to get to their dreams. Everybody is on the path to success at UNCG, and there’s no competition. It’s all like family at UNCG. You’re succeeding, we’re all succeeding. There’s enough room for everybody to succeed.”
This year’s scholarship recipient, Irani Molina-Olmedo of Winston-Salem, agrees with Wilson’s assessment of UNCG and is grateful to be a LIFE Scholar. Before receiving the scholarship, this senior at the School of Education worked full-time six days a week while attending classes. Thanks to Wilson’s generosity, this aspiring bilingual educator is focusing full-time on her studies and student teaching as she moves closer to her dream of becoming a teacher.
“Without this scholarship, I would have given up because I couldn’t have been able to do it financially,” she says. Now, thanks to Wilson’s gift, Molina-Olmedo and her entire family will soon celebrate with her at this year’s commencement ceremony.
Today, Wilson is advancing her academic career in California as a Diversifying Academica Recruiting Excellence (DARE) fellow at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education, where she is pursuing a PhD in Race, Inequality, and Language in Education (RILE) with a minor in Comparative Studies of Race and Ethnicity. She credits a professor at UNCG as the catalyst for this new degree. “She told me that I would be perfect for a doctoral program, and that inspired me,” Wilson says. “From that day forward, I knew it wasn’t a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when,’ and I created a plan to follow the dream.”
The Shameeka Monay Wilson Legacy in Furthering Education (LIFE) Endowed Scholarship in Education was part of UNCG’s Light the Way: The Campaign for Earned Achievement, with the goals of increasing access, elevating academic excellence, and enhancing the tremendous impact of UNCG’s programs.
By Jo Carol Torrez
Wilson photograph by Rob Searcey, Stanford University.