News from The Mahurin Honors College

Manzar Rzayeva (WKU ’22, ’24) accepted her Master of Science degree in public health a few weeks ago at the commencement ceremony held on May 2, 2024. Yet, much like her sentiments during her first walk in May 2022 to receive her Bachelor of Science degree, the path forward remains somewhat uncertain. However, uncertainty does not equate to lack of plans for Manzar; on the contrary, she harbors many aspirations, with becoming a Fulbright scholar and commencing medical school being primary among them.

Initially, our meeting was anticipated as a celebration of Manzar's status as a Fulbright finalist. However, just days prior to our interview, she received the news that she hadn't been selected. Despite grappling with disappointment, Manzar swiftly began plotting her next move, explaining that “I want to be given one more shot… third tries have been important in my family and we’re superstitious about it.”

Upon meeting Manzar, you are impressed by her energy, her passion for education, and her unyielding resilience. Her family relocated to the United States from Azerbaijan in 2015 when she was 14 years old and adjusting to a new way of life required optimism, courage, and openness to experience. Before her family’s relocation, Manzar was planning for a career in chemical engineering, but after arriving to the US she wasn’t “quite sure what I wanted to do, but I started to learn more about healthcare system in the US…. I’ve always known that I wanted to be something in health fields or STEM fields.”

Selecting WKU was the “easiest decision ever… because when I was applying for colleges we had just moved to the US, about a year and half, and all I knew was WKU, and all I was wanting was WKU because partly because I didn’t want to go through the process of starting life from scratch being away from my family.”

Manzar learned about the Mahurin Honors College from a friend who had asked her whether she was applying, and her off-the-cuff remark that she was going to apply pushed her into scheduling an honors campus visit to learn more. The tour was “probably one of the best things I had done” because the two HonorsToppers guides had given her so “much information about college, being a student, what to do and seeing their personalities” was empowering.

Commencing her journey at WKU in Fall 2018 as a chemistry and biology major, Manzar's exposure to nationally competitive scholarships came through an HON 105 course taught by Dr. Melinda Grimsley of the Office of Scholar Development. Despite her initial ineligibility due to pending residency status, her resolve to pursue a Fulbright persisted, buoyed by encouragement from Dr. Craig T. Cobane, former Executive Director of the Mahurin Honors College.

Prior to COVID-19, Dr. Cobane held a weekly tradition of early morning campus walks where honors students could receive individual coaching from Dr. Cobane to “realize their big dream.” On one of these walks, Manzar described how “he was talking about my big dream, and my big dream is to be a doctor. And he said, you can be a doctor at any point in life, so what is next, he asked. I told him about my passion for traveling, and teaching because I was a teaching assistant at the time and he mentioned what are things right now we can do and he mentioned Fulbright.”

Manzar submitted her first Fulbright application for a teaching assistantship in 2021. Teaching English to others sounded fun because “I’m still an English learner myself and it seemed like a fun experience to teach others.” She was unsuccessful in her first attempt.  “And something happened along the way, maybe my senior year, and I applied for Fulbright as a teaching assistant, and looking back, I was not the most prepared applicant [did not make it past the first cycle of selection].”

Manzar decided to take a gap year to “make decisions about my life.” She was still interested in medical school, but she wasn’t quite ready to make that final decision. Her interests were changing – she liked research, she liked work “where I can do things”, and she still wanted that Fulbright award. As she considered educational opportunities for her gap year, public health came to the forefront “because of an international healthcare course which I loved, but I didn’t know what it entailed being a [student in a] public health program”.

She reached out to the program chair and was able to get a complete view of course requirements and a timeline for graduation. She submitted her application over the summer in 2022 while she was visiting family in Azerbaijan. The program complimented her goal of enhancing her resume and educational background for medical school, while simultaneously allowing her to continue her work with the Medical Center as a laboratory assistant.

During Fall 2023 as a master’s student at WKU, she remembered that she was a member of the Fulbright Slack channel and on a whim, she opened the chat “to see what they’re doing” and was greeted with updates by the other members which reignited her goal to apply for Fulbright once more, and in January 2024, she reached back out to Dr. Grimsley. This time, Manzar knew that a research focus was truly her interest and she selected Türkiye because she “wanted to experience culture shock” and because she “at least knew some language”, and most importantly, she “wanted to feel safe as a Muslim person and to practice my religion.”

Establishing an affiliation with a Turkish university took a bit longer than she would have liked, but Manzar found a faculty member who was willing to serve as her institutional sponsor at the Koç University in Istanbul. She also felt good about her research focus: effects of linguistic and cultural barriers on maternal healthcare amongst migrants in Türkiye. In her master’s program, she was examining rates of c-sections among immigrant women, so her Fulbright proposal seemed like a natural extension of her research domain. Despite meticulous preparation, her second attempt yielded semi-finalist status, further fueling her resolve for a third endeavor.

“I’m a persistent person. I don’t give up easily. If you tell me that I have to quit something to win, I wouldn’t quit it – I love winning – but I don’t like quitting. I want to see my full potential.” And while on the verge of being conferred her master’s degree, Manzar is planning for a third attempt at the Fulbright. She attributes her persistence to her 14-year-old self, stating that “while some peers have already advanced to med school and are in other phases of life, I think the comparisons are unfair – I’ve only been [in the US] for 9 years, and I have done so much – so I’m more like 9 years old – and I’ve accomplished a lot. That’s drive for me to be persistent and passionate.”

Her words of encouragement for others are simple, “just do it, because I remember looking at the 2^nd floor of the MHC building at the wall of the [award] recipients, or the “adventures of the red towel” [on the 1^st floor] and thinking ‘it can’t be me’ but then my perspective changed to ‘it can be me’ and you need to find your drive and motivation.”