As Ryan Hatcher ’23 entered his final semester, he faced a difficult reality: He needed money to secure new housing, and for the first time in his college career, he would have to take out a student loan. Then came another setback: an emergency root canal.
“I’m someone who doesn’t really like to ask for support until I really feel like I need it,” Hatcher says. “I try to do things by myself as much as I can. But I didn’t have insurance, and I just didn’t have the money.”
It’s exactly this type of unplanned predicament that the UCF Student Emergency Fund is designed to help with. And unfortunately, such hardships are not uncommon. According to Tammie Nadeau, Ed.D., assistant dean of students, her team receives roughly 100 requests a month for assistance. Typically, they’re in response to an emergency, such as the loss of a job or a natural disaster, including when a nearby apartment complex flooded recently, and students needed to find and pay for temporary housing. But there are also simply random events, such as when a student’s car caught on fire, destroying her textbooks and laptop, and she didn’t have the money to replace everything.
For Ryan, the funding helped ensure that he completed his bachelor’s on time — as the first person in his birth family to earn a college degree. “The people at Student Care Services really do care,” he says. “They’re consistently at the forefront of making the best experience possible for students.”
Your gift can be a safety net for students like Hatcher, giving them the extra lift they need to launch their dreams.
