Grant Honors Student Who Drew Strength From Adversity

Most people can’t pinpoint the moment when their life changed, but for Jennifer Ma-Pham, it happened during a freshman sociology seminar at UC Irvine. A guest speaker addressing the topic of sexual abuse told her class of several hundred: “If you know someone, or you yourself were abused, remember that it’s not your fault.”

It was the first time that Ma-Pham, 21 and now a senior, had heard that. As a child, she said, she was abused for several years at the hands of a relative. Though years later she told her parents, it wasn’t until college that she sought help. As a peer counselor, she has since helped others recover from similar types of trauma.

It is that work, along with her stellar academic performance, that made the Fountain Valley resident one of 15 recent recipients of the inaugural fellowship from the Merage Institute for the American Dream, based in Orange County.

The fellowship, granted nationwide and providing $20,000 over two years, will be used to help offset Ma-Pham’s costs at Columbia University, where she will pursue a master’s in social work. The Fountain Valley High School graduate will get her bachelor’s degree in social ecology in June.

The fellowships, established by Southern California businessman Paul Merage, are designed to highlight the academic and social achievements of immigrant students. Merage, an immigrant from Iran, founded Hot Pockets frozen sandwiches in 1977.

“Because he was able to achieve his American dream, he wants to provide other immigrants” that same opportunity, said Tim Bolin, an associate at the Merage Foundation. “The idea is to ... leverage the immigrant community to better their odds of success.”

Donna Norris supervised Ma-Pham’s service work for two years at the Campus Assault Resource Program and the UCI Center for Women and Men. Ma-Pham’s experience has “given her an [added] level of understanding and awareness,” said Norris, coordinator of the resource program. “She’s remarkable all the way around.”

Ma-Pham and her Chinese Vietnamese parents left her native Hong Kong when she was 6 months old to move to a small apartment in Westminster. She has recently been asked to join Phi Beta Kappa and has a 3.76 grade-point average.

She said she hopes to one day open a nonprofit organization to work with children who have been sexually abused. “It was really a blessing [to be] recognized for a cause that’s hardly ever recognized,” she said.

This year’s other fellowship recipients include Armenian immigrant Ani Martikyan, a biology major at UCLA; Elizabeth Kwo, a Taiwanese immigrant majoring in biology at Stanford University; and India-born Nandini Chattopadhyay, an anthropology major at San Francisco State.