Melinda
San Carlos Apache
Haskell Indian Nations University

Insects are not high on many people's list of loves, but Melinda is one person who happens to love them. Adams is an environmental resources student in her fifth year of studies at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. A member of the San Carlos Apache tribe from Albuquerque, New Mexico Adams says what really “bugs” her is that if it was not for the American Indian College Fund and the Times Warner Merit Scholarship she received, she would have been unable to complete her education studying these creatures that give most of us the shivers.

After completing her studies at Haskell, Melinda plans to attend graduate school at the University of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana to study genetics in orthoptra (winged insects). She became interested in Notre Dame after she completed a two-year internship in environmental sciences. There she spent a year at a research center in Wisconsin, where she researched and studied aquatic insects, and a year at the national bison range in Montana, where she studied terrestrial insects.

“I attended a total of ten modules there,” she says, which included subjects such as entomology, grassland ecology, Native American archaeology, mammalogy, to name a few. She hopes to put her studies to use “looking at smaller ecosystems and the impact on their habitat from global warming, as well as ways to control and preserve them. I would like to then go back and work for my tribe or the EPA or a nonprofit that helps preserve the environment,” she says.

But getting to graduate school requires graduating with a bachelor's degree first. Melinda says that her scholarship has made that dream possible. “Here at Haskell, you have to pay for your own books when taking upper-level classes, and I cannot afford to pay for both books and my rent,” she says. The scholarship helped her make ends meet so she can continue her studies and make her dream of being a scientist come true, she says.