This week we welcome the director of the Office of Scholar Programs, Chaffee Viets, to the blog. Welcome, Chaffee!
This summer, Rockell Bartoli, host of the Scholar Budget Podcast, invited me to discuss our scholarship programs and share application tips with the motivated students and parents who listen to her show. Unfamiliar with her work at the time, I took a minute to listen to some of her episodes and quickly found a resonance with her purpose and ours.
Rockell wasn’t just helping students fund college debt-free (or nearly), but she was helping them understand the scholarship landscape, including community and college programs that offer not only educational scholarships, but also community and professional development.
During our chat, which can be found below, we discussed Tech’s signature opportunities, including the Stamps President’s Scholars and Tech Promise Scholars programs. We spoke about what it takes to earn these awards and how paying it forward is not only an expectation but a factor in selection and identification. While the former focuses on merit and the latter on a combination of need and merit, both provide a debt-free education and additional services, including enrichment funding and professional mentoring.
Later in the episode, we discussed some trends (pre- and post-pandemic) related to the importance of service and an almost exponential rise in the competitiveness needed to win awards from various universities and organizations.
I hope you’ll not only enjoy the friendly conversation but take away helpful information about not just Georgia Tech, but scholarship opportunities at large!
Chaffee directs the newly renamed Office of Scholars Programs (OSP) at Georgia Tech, originally taking the reins of the President’s Scholars Program in 2011. During his tenure, extraordinary philanthropic support from E. Roe Stamps, IV led to its renaming as the Stamps President’s Scholars Program, and Chaffee created a second award, the Gold Scholars Program, to complement it. Success in developing those programs led to the G. Wayne Clough Tech Promise Scholars Program being moved into the OSP formally this past spring. He holds two degrees in history from North Carolina State University (BA, MA). A member of the board of the National Scholarship Providers Association, Chaffee has spent his 26-year career devoted to building communities of scholars and to mentoring individuals with a pay it forward mindset.