Helping others through experience: 3 women receive memorial scholarship

Kelcy Dolan
Posted 8/18/15

By KELCY DOLAN

“They are all living the philosophy we promote here and that’s extremely admirable,” Lorna Ricci, executive director of OSCIL said about the three Catherine T. Murray Memorial …

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Helping others through experience: 3 women receive memorial scholarship

Posted

By KELCY DOLAN

“They are all living the philosophy we promote here and that’s extremely admirable,” Lorna Ricci, executive director of OSCIL said about the three Catherine T. Murray Memorial Scholarship recipients.

The scholarship was established in 1995 and has since distributed nearly $60,000 to college and technical school students with disabilities.

Murray, who was a longtime Warwick school teacher, was a volunteer and board member for the Ocean State Center for Independent Living (OSCIL).

Applicants must be attending a Rhode Island school and have a form of disability. This year, each recipient was awarded $1,110.

This year’s winners were Samantha Collins, Janice Wray and Brittany Martin. All three are in various stages of the University of Rhode Island’s nursing program.

Ricci said that Murray believed that college was a means to a career and strong career goals were important, something that is now looked for in applications.

Collins, who is completely deaf in her left ear and partially deaf in her right, will be finishing up her undergraduate degree at URI this fall and hopes to continue her education to receive a masters in geriatric psychology. She became interested in nursing after the death of her friend, Bethany Cyr, who lost a battle with cancer.

“She taught me so much,” Collins said. “I wanted to touch other people’s lives the way she had touched mine. The best way to do that is through nursing.”

Collins uses a special, “amazing,” electronic stethoscope that can increase the volume of a heartbeat while recording it as well.

Wray is in a part of URI’s masters program studying nursing education.

During the junior year of her undergraduate career, Wray was involved in a car accident, which injured her spinal cord. She is now paralyzed from the waist down and has little function in her hands. Although she returned to school a year after her injury to finish her degree, her goals had changed from being a staff nurse to teaching nurses.

“I went back to school so I could teach other nurses how to care for patients with spinal cord injuries or other physical disabilities,” she said.

She hopes to one day get her PhD so she can do research on spinal cord injuries.

Ricci said that Wray’s essay “blew everyone away.”

“These students epitomize independent living,” Ricci said. “They have moved past their disability to help others.”

A small check presentation was held at OSCIL on Thursday, August 13.

The final scholarship recipient, who could not attend the small ceremony, is Brittany Martin, who began at URI last year. In 2012 Martin was diagnosed with synovial sarcoma, a type of cancer that affects the joints.

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