Video Transcript
[Ashley Bates, BSU alum]: Hi, I’m Ashley Bates and I am teaching seventh grade English Language Arts at Sage Valley Middle School in Nampa, Idaho. I am really grateful for the opportunities that student teaching scholarship gave me when I was student teaching two years ago. I really wasn’t worried about finances or having to be at work because I had the scholarship and so I was really able to really dive in deep and really invest in my students and the instruction that we were doing in the classroom. And I also was able to take a lot of extra time to focus on applying for a fellowship for after I graduated, so I was able to go on a Fulbright to India last year and teach English and live there for a whole year, which was really, really amazing and was really important to shaping the kind of teacher that I am today. I was also able to use some of the funds that I could save for my scholarship to go on a study abroad trip through the Boise State Honors College and we were able to go to Ireland and to Rome and it was a really, really great way to finish my Boise State chapter, student teaching and then taking this really awesome trip that was really focused like educational with academically and I wouldn’t have been able to do any of those things if it weren’t for the student teaching scholarship that I had. Thank you for supporting future teachers.