“When the letter arrived saying I received a Foundation Excellence Award, my mother was so happy she just cried and cried,” said Bruno Perossa, a former Eagle Scout who has wanted to come to A&M since attending an Aggie football game as a 7th-grader. “Of course, I’m also the last of five children to move away from home, so that might have had something to do with her emotions,” he adds, “but I’m close enough to Houston to be able to visit her and my dad fairly often.”

Bruno is pursuing a modern languages degree with a high concentration of science electives to prepare for the medical school entrance exams, or MCAT. The former president of the National Honor Society at Memorial High School in Houston hopes to become a physician serving patients in poverty-stricken areas.
Bruno is one of several hundred students now benefiting from Foundation Excellence Awards at Texas A&M. The Texas A&M Foundation established the scholarship program in 1998 to help the university increase diversity within its student body. The awards are available to outstanding students from underrepresented groups, including minorities and students from economically disadvantaged areas and educationally disadvantaged backgrounds. Perossa’s FEA is funded with a gift from the Houston A&M Club.

FEA scholar Sandra Long, a marketing major from Livingston, said that her high school counselor literally pulled her out of class one day to hand her an FEA application and urge her to apply. “Receiving an FEA to go to A&M was like an unexpected, wonderful blessing from the sky,” she said. But Sandra’s first semester at A&M was tough, and her grades weren’t as high as she had hoped they would be. “I just took some goal-setting techniques that I learned in high school and in athletics and put them to work my second semester at A&M,” she said, “because I didn’t want to settle for anything less than a 3.5 grade point average.”

Sandra, whose FEA is funded by a Ford Foundation gift, is now meeting her immediate goals and working hard to achieve her long-term goals, which include earning a degree in marketing. She said having an FEA really takes some financial pressure off so that she can focus on her studies and the A&M experience. “It’s so nice and really amazing that people care about students and support these scholarship programs,” she said. “To be on the receiving end is awesome. It definitely inspires you to do the same. I hope I can do great things and return the favor someday.”

Outstanding minority students are heavily recruited, and frequently select out-of-state universities like Yale and MIT that offer extremely attractive financial aid packages. The FEA encourages these students from diverse backgrounds to consider Texas A&M. A key goal of Texas A&M’s Vision 2020 plan is to recruit recruit outstanding minority students and provide the educational opportunities and leadership development experiences that will prevent them as future leaders of Texas.

For more information about making a gift to the FEA, contact the foundation’s assistant director of corporate relations, Al Pulliam ’87, at 800-392-3310 or 979-845-8161, e-mail apulliam@tamu.edu.