Allen Richey received 37 percent of students’ votes in Wednesday’s election for student body president — but that is not all he is smiling about.
Richey was awarded the Harry S. Truman Scholarship Monday, making him the first LSU student to win the award. The scholarship includes a $30,000 grant, which Richey will to use to pay for graduate school.
According to the scholarship’s Web site, www.truman.gov, the scholarship’s mission is “to find and recognize college juniors with exceptional leadership potential who are committed to careers in government, the non-profit or advocacy sectors, education or elsewhere in the public service; and to provide them with financial support for graduate study, leadership training, and fellowship with other students who are committed to making a difference through public service.”
Professor Perry Prestholdt, the faculty member who nominated Richey, said the Truman Scholarship is the most prestigious award in the field of public service.
In addition to the initial $30,000, the grant awards recipients $27,000 for every two years of graduate school.
“[The Truman Scholarship committee] looks for individuals who are going to contribute something to the world,” Prestholdt said.
Prestholdt said Richey will make an impact in the field of public service because “First he has the capability and second, he wants to.”
During the interview with the selection committee, Richey said one of the topics he discussed was his goal to make “poverty an economic condition, not a social [condition].”
Richey said he seeks to help impoverished people through job training. He also said he wants to use education as a tool to fight poverty.
He said while working as a student worker at the Death Penalty Litigation office, he met a 28-year-old man who was in line for the death penalty for shooting his pregnant 15-year-old girlfriend.
Richey said the man went to jail when he was 15 and was released when he was 21. Richey said since the man had no high school education or training, he sold drugs to make a living. Richey said the man was born into poverty, and if school was a place of guidance, three lives would have been saved.
“He felt he had no options, but he did; it’s just difficult to find them sometimes,” Richey said.
Richey says he tutors 8- to 12-year-old boys in a group home twice a week. He said most of them are underprivileged and have discipline and behavioral problems.
Before he goes to graduate school, he plans to go into the Peace Corps for two years because he wants to experience another culture and help needy people outside the United States, Richey said.