The scholarship money is great, but David Hannan said it pales in comparison to the friendships he’s made.
“There’s nothing like staying up until 3 in the morning having some deep conversations with your best friend,” he said. “We talked about everything, about stuff I couldn’t talk about with someone else.”
Hannan, 19, is a rising sophomore at Marshall University. As a senior at St. Albans High School, he was one of eight students chosen to receive Marshall’s highest award, the Yeager Scholarship.
It pays all of Hannan’s tuition for four years, all of his room and board and includes a textbook allowance, a stipend, funds to study at Oxford for a summer and a personal computer.
Add all of the benefits together, Hannan said, and it’s an award worth about $100,000.
Yeager Scholars live together, they work together and they study together. But besides a love of learning, they might not have much else in common. The ragtag group of intelligent people quickly turns into a family, they say.
Cody Mason, one of Hannan’s best friends, graduated the same year as Hannan and also was selected into the Yeager Scholars program. This year, they learned their younger friend, Victoria Endres, also was accepted into the program.
Hannan and his friends agree that their different backgrounds and interests are what make that family so valuable.
Victoria Endres has learned to easily laugh at herself.
She’s going to study literature at Marshall, but she isn’t afraid to tell you she likes reading teen romance novels about vampires.
When she leaves Marshall, she hopes to teach the English language around the world.
“I think teaching English is — well, it’s a major world language,” said Endres, 18. “If you can teach them English, you can open up new doors for them. It’s a way for me to travel and a way for me to help people.”
Friends say Endres wasn’t always this comfortable with herself — or as tenacious as she is now.
“I didn’t know her that well, at first,” Hannan said. “At first, she was like this closet smart person, but then she became more confident over time.”
Before, Endres said, it was hard for her to accept that she was different from her fellow students. She remembers teachers asking their classes a question. She remembers sitting quietly with an answer burning in her head.
“I learned not to care so much about what people thought,” Endres said.
During the interview weekend where Endres met other Yeager Scholarship finalists, she met a young woman named Abby.
“The first thing she said to me was, ‘If you were at Hogwarts, what house would you be in?’” Endres recalls Abby saying.
This comforted Endres. If Abby could be so ostentatious with her love of Harry Potter, she could be at least comfortable with being the smart girl who likes to read.
Cody Mason, 19, also of St. Albans, wasn’t one of the kids who goofed off in band class. He practiced playing his alto saxophone religiously, and friends say he was pretty good.
When he was finally selected as the marching band’s drum major and field commander, his dreams came true.
During the summer before his senior year, before he even had a chance to lead the band at a football game, he made the mistake of riding a bike down a hill that was much too steep.
The bike wobbled. He crashed and broke his foot. His heart was broken, too.
“I had to step down; I couldn’t do it,” Mason said. “It was a really big moment for my maturity because I just had to sit and think about how I couldn’t do this, how I had messed up.”
He kept playing, though. When the time came to audition for West Virginia’s All-State Band, he almost made the cut. Almost.
It was somewhere around this time that a representative of the Yeager Scholars Program sat down with him to tell him about the scholarship.
“When that happened, I just kind of took my dreams and said, ‘No,’” Mason recalled. “I always thought maybe I’d be an engineer one day — I like math and I’m OK with science.”
He always knew he was going to college; it was only a matter of where he would go and how he would get there. Now, he’s veered from his musical path and is studying civil engineering.
Hannan is double-majoring in creative writing and statistics, and yes, he knows how ridiculous that sounds at first.
He wants a degree in math just for the job security. He really wants to be a writer, but he knows how hard that’s going to be.
“Well, that’s not completely true,” he said. “I’m going to be a pastor.”
His life was flipped upside down when he became a Christian four years ago.
Hannan spends his spare time mulling around different coffee shops on and around campus while talking to new people and learning to see things from their perspective.
His favorite part of the scholarship program, so far, has been shaking the hand of Chuck Yeager, the West Virginia native who was the first pilot to break the sound barrier.
“It’s like brushing past history,” he said.
As Hannan, Mason and Endres write their own history, they’re glad to write it together.
Reach Jake Jarvis at jake.jarvis@wvgazette.com, 304-348-7905 or follow @NewsroomJake on Twitter.