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Great Barrington and Lee — Monument Mountain Regional High School announced that graduating senior Olivia Simms, of Lee, has received a full, four-year Questbridge scholarship to The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. While several Monument students apply each year for the highly sought-after scholarship, she is the first student from the school to receive it since 2011.
This year’s nationwide Questbridge application process resulted in 25,500 applicants who were narrowed down to 7,288 finalists, and then to just 2,627 recipients, who are sponsored to attend one from among 52 selective schools, a list which includes Holy Cross, Tufts, Amherst, Bowdoin, Williams, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Notre Dame.
Questbridge, started by two Stanford University students in 1994, “connects high-achieving students from low-income backgrounds with a thriving community and transformative educational, career, and life opportunities that help propel them to lives of fulfillment, meaning, and purpose.” Of this year’s recipients, 92 percent are in the top 10 percent of their graduating class, and 83 percent are among the first generation in their families to attend a four-year college in the United States.
When she heard she was a finalist for such a long-shot scholarship, Olivia recalls, “I was really nervous, because what if I don’t get it? I just didn’t want to get my hopes up.” She had two weeks of anxiety until the afternoon of December 1, when she got an alert that her Questbridge profile had been updated. “Is it ok if I got home early?” she asked her boss at Lee Youth Association, where she has worked for years. “I can’t wait any longer.” She got permission to go home, and she and her mom Jennifer sat down in front of the laptop.
In retrospect, the two wish they had filmed the next moment when, says Olivia, “I went to my page, clicked on ‘view update,’ and there were streamers all over.”
“It was shock and awe for a few minutes,” says Jennifer. “We were laughing, then saying, ‘Oh my god!’ and then crying.”
“I just couldn’t believe it,” says Olivia.
Monument’s latest Questbridge recipient is a three-year varsity softball player, a National Honor Society member, and president of the Key Club, where some of her favorite community service projects have been the food and teddy bear drives. Through her four-year coursework and training through Monument’s Early Childhood Education pathway, Olivia has earned Berkshire Community College credits. Her internship is at Muddy Brook Elementary, where she works one on one with a second grade student. Olivia is interested in studying psychology in college and pursuing a career as a school adjustment counselor, and she gives credits for these goals to both Monument’s “fun and engaging” psychology courses and the clinical psychology team of counselors at the school who openly shared their own career paths with her and other students.
Olivia is only the second student in Guidance Counselor Michael Powell’s 33 years at Monument to earn a Questbridge scholarship. Powell had this to say of his fortunate student: “Olivia has demonstrated her resiliency many times. She’s soft spoken but not afraid to speak her mind and stand up for something or someone when she thinks an injustice is occurring. She’s goal driven and gives a lot of her time to help others.”
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