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The Ramsey Family’s Scholarships at UW Medicine
Some advice sticks with you. Bonnie Ramsey, M.D., Res. ’79, remembers discussing research opportunities with a professor when she was an undergraduate majoring in biology. The man was blunt, recalls Ramsey. “He told me I would starve to death if I became a Ph.D.”
Ramsey, professor of pediatrics and director of the Cystic Fibrosis Center at Seattle Children’s, chose a somewhat different path, pursuing an academic research career. She was later quite successful in finding research money but found that her professor was right in one respect: academic medicine demands a great deal of funding, from federal sources, foundations and private donors.
Bonnie Ramsey and her husband, Paul G. Ramsey, M.D., CEO of UW Medicine, executive vice president for medical affairs, and dean of the School of Medicine, University of Washington, have chosen to help support academic medicine by contributing to scholarship.
The decision to support scholarship was a natural one. “Our parents emphasized education,” says Dean Ramsey. In his case, he says, he was lucky. His parents were able to pay for his medical school education. What this meant, says Ramsey, was “freedom of choice.” He didn’t have to make a career choice based on the need to pay off a large debt.
That freedom — to choose academic medicine over private practice or to pick essential primary and rural practice over higher-paying specialties — is closely allied with UW Medicine’s mission. “I see the effects of debt on the choices students make in their professional careers,” says Dean Ramsey. “Scholarship is one of the highest priorities we have at UW Medicine.”
To provide students with broader career choices, the Ramseys created the Frederick T. and Dorothy H. Ramsey Endowed Scholarship in 2001. Named after Dean Ramsey’s parents, the scholarship supports students interested in academic medicine or in practicing medicine in underserved areas.
Of course, scholarships can also serve a more basic purpose — simply helping students afford medical school. The medical scholarship that Bonnie Ramsey received at Harvard paid half her tuition, and “made it possible for me to complete my education,” she says.
In 2006, the Ramseys created two additional scholarship funds at UW Medicine: the Ramsey Family Endowed Scholarship and the James G. and Betty Clawson Watts Endowed Scholarship, the latter named after Bonnie Ramsey’s parents. In part, these gifts were a response to the University’s Faculty-Staff-Retiree Campaign, which provides matching funds (and naming opportunities) for gifts up to $10,000 made in support of student scholarships or student programs.
In making gifts to scholarship, the Ramseys are keeping an eye on students’ present-day challenges. The cost of medical school continues to rise; the median debt load of the UW’s 2006 medical school graduates was $105,000* — more, if undergraduate debt is counted. But the Ramseys are also mindful of a future in which they hope to see an ever more diverse group of students, and a larger pool of scholarships to recruit and retain them.
Making these gifts, says Bonnie Ramsey, “makes me feel like I’m part of creating a community.” Paul Ramsey concurs. “It feels good,” he says. “And it’s the right thing to do.”
* for 2008 graduates, that number rose to approximately $121,700
2007
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