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The Truman Scholarship was obviously named after
President Harry S. Truman.
And it's intended to go to students who are preparing to
go to public service.
Typically, the students who apply really want to give
back, really have a deep, abiding, sincere commitment to
what it means to serve the public.
When the student comes in, I try to help the student
understand that it's highly competitive, and the chances
of winning, say a Truman, are very slim.
It's a long shot.
I mean that the odds are not with you when you're applying
for these national scholarships.
We've not had a Truman Fellow for over 25 years.
In my sixth year of doing that work, Brooks
Payette turned up.
What I always hope for and look for is someone who walks
into the office, and, all of a sudden, I said, yes this is
someone who's real.
Hey, Brooks.
How are we doing?
OK, good to see you.
Nice to see you.
Great to see you.
I attended the meeting and said, well, I'm doing pretty
well in school.
I've had a commitment to public service, community
service, my entire life.
And I had a lot of leadership opportunities and experiences.
And so I said, this scholarship kind of sounds
like something that would fit me.
Brooks represent something that I have always loved about
the University of New Hampshire.
Collect.
The first generation college student who, extraordinarily
bright, talented, motivated, committed.
I'd say, give him that list of top 10 states.
And the university is able to help students like that really
achieve at a very high level and mix with the best of their
generation, across the country.
Part of the reason I became a professor way to meet students
like Brooks and hopefully help them out in a little way.
I thought, well, he's going to be the perfect Truman Scholar
candidate, except, he was a nontraditional student.
I grew up in Berlin, New Hampshire, in northern New
Hampshire, a very small town, big into the mill industry.
My father worked in the mill.
It was also a hockey town, USA Berlin.
So growing up from five years old, right up until I
graduated high school it was hockey, hockey, hockey, the
year around.
In high school I stayed pretty busy.
I always took classes.
I never had a study hall the entire time.
That was the one record I left high school with.
I had the most credits from Berlin High School.
So, till this day, it still stands.
But I like to stay busy.
The more I learned about Brooks, the more
impressed I've been.
He's a serious young man.
And he has more under his belt than
your typical UNH undergrad.
My sophomore year of college, when I went to school at USM,
in Gore, Maine, and the mill shut down for the first time,
it was certainly tough.
My father lost his job.
It actually affected my financial aid.
Financially it was impossible to stay in school.
I think it's especially significant that Brooks came
from the north country of New Hampshire, a place that's
often not paid attention to, as it's lost
population over time.
And it's lost significance as an
industrial center, of course.
But it was a blessing in disguise.
During that time, I got the head coaching position for
Berlin women's hockey, which is a goal.
I always wanted to coach at the high school level.
And then a couple months later, I actually got hired as
a sports editor, for which I worked for for five years.
I kept finding new layers of depths of him and his self
understanding of what he'd done.
He's rightly proud of what he's done.
But it doesn't come across as boasting.
He just tells you.
And you say, wow, that's just pretty great.
Throughout my life, really, it's been
about service, to me.
I enjoy it, whether it be serving the community and that
sort of stuff.
But there's something in me that I needed a new challenge.
Good morning, sir.
I'd always thought of joining the military.
I wanted to finish my degree.
So the two of them really went hand in hand.
I enlisted in the Air National Guard in 2008, in November.
And then simultaneously applied to UNH.
It was accepted.
And began UNH in the fall of 2009.
This guy has worked his way through college, in and out of
college, taking jobs, going in the Air Force.
And he made his breakthrough at UNH, in terms of academia,
and a 4.0, and knowing what he wanted to do.
The Republican Party--
I took a class, the Presidency, with Professor
Scala, and I loved the class.
I think that the faculty, here, has done a good job at
recognizing someone who wants to make the most out of their
experience here.
And they recognize that with me.
Just in terms of excellence, he set the standard, I think,
for UNH students in my future.
I came to understand later, by working with him, how it was
that he could command a unit of 100 other
people in the Air Force.
And his unit would win top awards, because those 100 men,
obviously, trusted him, because they bonded with them.
He's that kind of person.
You bond with him through trust.
Well, thank you very much sir.
Have a great day.
My staff sergeant, he used to call me, Mr. President, just
because I was always reading books, or political science
books, or books on the presidency in our free time.
Can it be legitimate?
Can it be passed?
This is why public universities are important, to
help students like Brooks get that foot in the door, and
then see what he does with it.
It was a scholarship, I really felt like, if there was one
out there that was me, I felt like, this one was me.
He was quite sure he had not won one, because he had been
in touch with some of the other finalists, and they had
already heard.
I was walking to go to class, and I said, I
would know by now.
There's no way.
Everybody else knows.
I would know.
This is the only program, I know of, that had the idea,
which I think is wonderful, that the president or provost
should simply walk in on one of Brooks classes and call it
out, and tell it--
wow, I start to cry.
There's a great picture of him at the moment.
He was standing there with Lisa McFarland and John Aber,
thinking somebody else had won something or done something.
And they said, Truman Scholar.
And they said my name, and I popped my head up.
And, of course, when he said my name, I knew
it was for the Truman.
It's incredibly fun to let somebody know.
These kinds of awards change people's lives.
It wasn't about the money.
It was just really about a winning this scholarship,
because of who Harry Truman was, and what the
scholarship stood for.
He's typical of the UNH student that I've found here,
who can compete anywhere with anyone, with anyone in an
elite private college.
There's two areas I'm really interested.
The first one is increasing physical fitness to combat
childhood obesity in schools.
That's kind of, I would say, my champion
cause, going forward.
I'm actually hoping to intern at the White House with the
First Lady's, Let's Move Program, this summer.
Our job, as educators, is to take whoever comes here and
move them to the next step in their lives.
My time at UNH has been great.
I've got more out of it than I ever imagined.
I guess my dreams and my horizons have expanded since
coming here.