Before arriving at Grand Valley, or any college for that matter, Dai’Mion Banks said she applied for “what felt like 100” scholarships. Turns out, the one she received to enroll landed in her inbox at the last minute.
Banks, who will earn a bachelor’s degree in allied health sciences, was a member of the first cohort of students in the Battle Creek Pipeline Scholarship program . Scholarship recipients are graduates of Battle Creek Central High School and typically studying education, nursing, health professions or STEM disciplines.
The program, now in its final year, provided scholarship recipients with full tuition and room and board. Banks said that opportunity came at the exact right time for her and her family.
“I very much appreciate receiving the pipeline scholarship,” Banks said. “With it, I was not stressed about paying for college. It helped tremendously.”
Banks serves as a peer mentor for the pipeline scholarship program. Active on campus, she is also the vice president for Black Student Union, a peer mentor for Black Excellence 365 and a member of You Beautiful Black Woman.
These activities are in addition to her work at Trinity Health Grand Rapids as a patient care assistant. When working at the downtown Grand Rapids hospital, Banks said she strives to “make the hospital feel like a home” for the oncology patients in her charge.
“I do everything I can to provide empathy and add a level of improvement to their quality of care,” she said.
That work has inspired Banks to pursue a master’s degree in social work as she considers a career in patient advocacy. Fitting, as Banks said she has appreciated the staff at Grand Valley who have helped and advocated for her.
“I’m really big on having people in my corner and have received a lot of support from the Battle Creek Regional Center and Office of Multicultural Affairs,” Banks said.
Maria Gavina Nunez will graduate with a bachelor’s degree in nursing, finishing the degree in slightly more than one year with the help of funding from the Corewell Health West Nurse Scholars program.
Two years ago, GVSU and Corewell Health announced a unique partnership to address the current shortage of nurses. Corewell Health pledged to invest more than $19 million over six years into the program that will create opportunities for 500 students to pursue a nursing degree at GVSU.
Nunez was in the first cohort of students to receive this scholarship. Recipients must work for two years for the hospital system; Nunez plans to work into the cardiopulmonary unit.
“Receiving this financial support not only helped me pay for part of my tuition but will also lead to a job right after graduation,” said Nunez. “Through this scholar’s program, I was able to attend various Corewell Health council meetings, which exposed me to the different councils I could join as a nurse.”
Nunez earned a bachelor’s degree in allied health sciences and psychology from Grand Valley in 2016. After working for almost seven years, Nunez said she decided to return to school for a nursing degree so that she could follow her passion for caring for others and be able to use the experience from her three degrees.
“Something I left behind a while ago was serving as an advocate for health equity and social justice,” she said. “As a nurse, I will be working with some of the most vulnerable and marginalized patients. I am excited to incorporate the tools and knowledge that I’ve gained in this nursing program to help make a substantial difference in the community.”
Nunez said she enjoyed the community outreach that she was exposed to as part of her studies at the Kirkhof College of Nursing. During her clinical rotations, Nunez and other students were placed in an underserved area to assist local residents. Nunez said she was upset by the way some residents were treated during their previous health care experiences. She wants to be the difference that brings positive change to the system.
“I do not want to only complete my daily nursing tasks and then forget about the patient after they leave me,” Nunez said. “I want my care to stretch beyond the doors of the hospital. I even have dreams to open a food pantry on the unit that I will work in. This will allow us to help those who might not be able to access or afford the healthy food they need for better recovery and health outcomes.”
– Thomas Garrett is a student writer for University Communications. Garrett, a native of Stevensville, is graduating with a degree in writing.
Skyler Ruiter wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to do after college until he made one life-changing decision: joining Grand Valley’s computing club.
Ruiter, who is earning a degree in computer science, is now wrapping up his time as the club’s president – which he said has been a rewarding personal challenge, teaching him invaluable leadership skills as he worked to rebuild the group post-COVID.
“I made a bunch of friends and developed a lot of really good social skills. Most importantly, though, I learned how to be a leader, which is not something I would generally put myself in the position to be,” he said. “I’m not usually the person to take charge and lead everything. I’ll just kind of sit back and do my work. But that whole experience has provided me with a lot of reflection on what it means to be a leader and to be part of an organization to help other people.”
Through the computing club, not only did Ruiter gain valuable perspective and leadership experience, but he was exposed to something that’d give him insight into what’s next for him: undergraduate research. “I would say the undergraduate research has been my favorite part of being in Grand Valley,” he noted.
Through connections made in the computing club, Ruiter was introduced to Grand Valley’s Applied Computing Institute and began working with Zachary DeBruine, assistant professor of computing. At the time, Ruiter knew only that he wanted to make a difference and work on a unique project. Flash forward to now, and he recaps his recent visit to the 2024 Data Compression Conference in Utah, where he and DeBruine had the opportunity to share the research they’d spent years working on.
“[DeBruine] is a bioinformatics professor who is familiar with genomic and genetic data, so that’s the type of stuff that we were interested in compressing: data that looks or feels like genetic data, where it’s really big and really sparse,” Ruiter described. “There are a lot of duplicate values. We created a library for general scientific use and put it out in the public for everybody to use.”
The opportunity to participate in undergraduate research helped Ruiter find his path, even if he found it later than some of his peers. “My coworker, he knew he wanted to go work for NASA. He knew he wanted his doctorate. I didn’t know I wanted to do that until late in my junior year,” He said. “Research made a huge impact on my ability to perceive where I wanted to go and what I wanted to do. It gave me the confidence to say: ‘I am capable.’”
His advice to other Lakers? Get involved, and forge your own path. “You get to make your own experience out of your education. You can do impactful research as an undergrad. I set myself up for a whole career that I didn’t know I even wanted until I started doing research.”
Ruiter has no plans to slow down following his graduation. Following Commencement, he’ll head to New Mexico for a summer internship with the Department of Energy, where he’ll be working in Sandia National Laboratories. After his internship wraps up, he’ll begin working toward his doctorate.
“I’ve loved Grand Valley every step of the way. I have made the best of my experience here.”
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