A Hunt Leadership Scholarship allowed Rachel Ball ('06), an Indian studies major, to study abroad in Paris, Australia and Southeast Asia. "Living abroad is a life-altering experience," she says.
Hunt Leadership Scholars Program
When Rachel Ball ('06) left her hometown of White Settlement, Texas, for Dallas to attend SMU, she began a journey that would take her to three continents and open her mind to a world much larger than her small North Texas town.
She saw desperate poverty on the streets of India and was awed by the temples of Angkor in Cambodia. At SMU she worked with professors to create a rigorous individualized major in Indian studies, then graduated among the top 1 percent of the class of 2006.
The first member of her close-knit family to attend college, Ball seized every opportunity she could as a recipient of the Hunt Leadership Scholarship.
"My world was very small when I came to SMU," she says. "The Hunt Leadership Scholars Program allowed me to study abroad in Paris, Southeast Asia and Australia. Living abroad is a life-altering experience. One becomes a different person and, I believe, a better person."
At SMU, Ball helped lead organizations that reflected her passions. She was president of the SMU chapter of Amnesty International and secretary of the Indian Student Association. She chaired the Student Senate Diversity Committee, and as student representative to the Board of Trustees Committee on Student Affairs, she helped develop presentations on campus ethnic and religious diversity.
"The great thing about college is exploring other cultures,"says Ball, a fourth-generation Texan who is now studying South Asian history in the Ph.D. program at Boston College.
"As time passes and you look back upon the years that you spent on this campus, you will find that, while you were here, you developed some of your closest enduring friendships, realized some of the more important truths that subsequently fashioned your life, and refined many of the skills which, hopefully, will allow you to compete successfully in the rapidly changing world in which you will live." – Ray L. Hunt ('65)
Ball is one of more than 250 students who have been awarded the Hunt Leadership Scholarship since 1993, when Nancy Ann ('65) and Ray L. Hunt ('65) established the program to recruit and foster students who have demonstrated extraordinary leadership, academic achievement and a strong sense of social responsibility. The scholarships cover tuition less the amount of resident tuition of the leading public university in the student's home state, plus costs associated with education abroad.
Beyond financial support, Hunt Leadership Scholars are given the opportunity to learn from local and international leaders, including speakers of the Willis M. Tate Distinguished Lecture Series. They also develop leadership skills by participating in campus and community service activities.
"This program has meant opportunities that I never would have had, knowing people I never would have known and realizing the potential that I never knew I possessed,"says Ball.