Connecticut Womens Hall of Fame Awards 2025 Eileen Kraus Scholarship to UConn Student – Patch
STORRS, CT — The Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame has announced that first-year University of Connecticut student Tasneem Voghol has been awarded the prestigious Eileen Kraus Scholarship for 2025.
The award will be presented in a ceremony at UConn Hartford Hartford Times Building Atrium on Thursday, from 5 to 6:30 p.m. The scholarship awards one $5,000 non-renewable scholastic gift to an outstanding Connecticut woman entering her first year of college or university.
Tasneem wrote her winning essay about Dr. Helen Smits, who she identified as one of her greatest inspirations. Tasneem aspires to not only be a physician, but like Dr. Smits, she dreams of being an advocate and catalyst for change, of making health care a right, and not a privilege, of improving the conditions of life in marginalized communities, and of curing vulnerable sick people.
“The story of my life and my dreams is an accumulation of others from many corners of the world,” Tasneem, whose family came to the United States from Jordan, wrote in her essay. “The dreams that were crushed and left unaccomplished because of poverty, the lives that were lost to treatable illnesses because of medical disadvantage, and the hidden stories that were left without a happy ending.”
Tasneem has begun her first year at UConn as a Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences major and biology and global studies double minor. Through this interdisciplinary course of study, Tasneem aspires to catalyze change in the global health sphere.
As a student at Madina Academy in Windsor, Tasneem served in myriad leadership positions including Vice President of the Connecticut Association of National Honor Societies, and Vice President of her school’s student government. She volunteered internationally for organizations where she assisted vulnerable children living in disadvantaged areas of the world suffering from health and economic disparities.
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