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Taking a Chance on Students
UW Medicine Class of 1957 Endowed Scholarship Fund
Jim Wade, M.D. ’57, worked his way through college by taking a messy, smelly summer job: cleaning animal cages at the University of Washington. When the Seattle resident had to choose between two good medical schools — Washington University in St. Louis, Mo., and the UW School of Medicine — he chose Seattle, and the school with the lower tuition.
It was a good decision, he says. After training in psychiatry and family medicine, Wade eventually moved to Hood River, Ore., where he practiced for more than 35 years. He served as a medical director in hospice medicine for another 10 years. “I was doing everything here, because there were no specialists,” says Wade. He loved it. And so in 2006, when his friend Anna Chavelle, M.D. ’57, asked Wade to contribute to the Class of 1957’s reunion gift, he didn’t hesitate to give.
Anna Chavelle, class representative for the 1957 graduates and former president of the UW Medicine Alumni Association, had also grown up in Seattle. In contrast, her parents, both physicists, paid for her medical education. “Nobody realized at that time that it was such a good medical school,” she says. “Now, 50 years later, I can look back and think that it was a good decision.”
It was also a bargain. Although some students still had debt, says Chavelle, it’s nothing compared to the debt loads students must take on today — more than $100,000 for many graduates. “That’s like an albatross,” she says.
Realizing the impact of debt on students’ lives, and following the tradition set by classes that have gone before, Chavelle and the Class of 1957 decided to celebrate their 50th reunion by creating a scholarship. First, Chavelle organized a reunion committee. Then she took up the challenge of asking each of her 52 surviving classmates for a gift.
Jerry Trier, M.D. ’57, a gastroenterologist living in Boston, Mass., was on the reunion committee. He was one of the first people Chavelle called.
As a medical student, Trier had received the Dunlap Scholarship, which paid for his tuition and books. Some students had other resources, too, remembers Trier. “Many of us got summer research jobs with faculty,” he says. “It was effectively a free education.” That’s not the case anymore, he says, given the high cost of medical education. In giving to his class’s scholarship fund, says Trier, “I certainly wanted to do my share.”
When Chavelle spoke with her classmates, she heard a common refrain. Over and over, she says, her classmates told her that the School’s admissions committee had taken a chance on them — a chance that had paid off. And they wanted to give back for the education they had received.
This feeling is certainly familiar to Jim Wade. His admission to the School of Medicine, he says, was based more on the recommendation of his biology professor at Reed College than on his grades. The School’s admissions committee made a decision that has provided him with a good living, and a good life. “Practicing family medicine in a small town has been the most wonderful thing,” says Wade.
And why give to the Class of 1957’s scholarship? “Because I can and I should,” he says. “So I did.”
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