“THE KRAMP SCHOLARSHIP GAVE ME HOPE FOR MY EDUCATION AND FUTURE CAREER.”

– KATHY TRAN

Kathy Tran

Kramp Scholar, Brookhaven College

Kathy Tran still sometimes has a hard time reconciling her brutally difficult adolescent years with her life as a college art student today. Pregnant by assault at 13, she fought for and won the right to plead her case before a judge to get an abortion without parental consent.

No longer able to live with her parents, she was taken in by one of her elementary school counselors. “It surprises me now as an adult that I even made it out of those years,” she says.

Though in her situation it was an accomplishment to even make it through high school, she was devastated that as hard as she had worked, her grades and test scores weren’t strong enough to realize her college dreams.

Then she was awarded the Erin Tierney Kramp Encouragement Scholarship to attend Brookhaven College.

“There are not a lot of scholarships that reward you for overcoming adversity,” she says. “I felt like a failure because I had worked so hard and had so many circumstances to overcome, but the Kramp scholarship gave me hope for my education and future career. It’s not just about academics; receiving the scholarship made me feel valuable.”

A creative director for Brookhaven’s student newspaper, she also freelances as a photographer and graphic designer; her multimedia artwork has been exhibited at the Dallas Museum of Art and Goss Michael Gallery. She’d like to some day be an advertising art director and is working to maintain a 3.5 GPA so that she can transfer to SMU on an Erin Tierney Kramp Honors Transfer Scholarship.

Fighter, survivor, talented multimedia artist – and bear. Amid all that she still deals with, she finds time to be the school mascot at Brookhaven. And today she enjoys a good relationship with both her biological parents and the adoptive parents who took her in at 13.

“Like a lot of people my age, I spent a lot of time looking for myself,” says Kathy. “But now I believe that instead of looking for yourself, life is about creating yourself. I’m a boxer. When I’m boxing and fall to the ground with an opponent, I feel the most strong when I get back up. Creating art is a healing process for me to express the pain and psychological damage of my past.”

See Kathy’s multimedia art at www.kathy-tran.com