Rochester Review
Story as a PDF
Departments
-->Rochester Review
Jonathan Vazquez ’11 has found lessons in the sport of boxing that are guiding him in his work as a student at Rochester.
Possibilities open, he says, when you’re “determined to do something. You can’t accomplish goals if you don’t believe you can.”
Vazquez’s primary goal is earning a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University. Then, he says, he hopes to pursue a graduate degree at the Simon School.
They’re goals that boxing itself is making possible. Vazquez is the first recipient of the Geneva Boxing Team Scholarship, a new scholarship that honors Tim Hill, the coach of a boxing team in the Finger Lakes town of Geneva.
In a ceremony this winter in Geneva, Jonathan Burdick, dean of Admissions and Financial Aid in the College, along with Hill and other community leaders formally marked the establishment of the scholarship. Burdick proposed the idea of the 10-year commitment after learning about the boxing club when Hill and his family were featured in a 2008 episode of ABC-TV’s Extreme Makeover.
Hill, a former professional boxer, and his family have devoted themselves to helping young people, especially those at risk.
“I’ve never met anybody as caring as he is about his community,” Vazquez says of his coach.
The scholarship provides up to $400,000 in financial aid over the next decade to Geneva Boxing Team members who demonstrate a serious commitment to the pursuit of higher education at the University. Last year Vazquez, of Newark, N.Y., earned his associate’s degree at Finger Lakes Community College, and he became a student at the University in the fall. Through the scholarship, he’ll receive $40,000 toward his college expenses each year.
“No one in my family has graduated with a bachelor’s degree,” says Vazquez, and he has relished his transition to Rochester.
“I love the atmosphere, and the environment,” he says. And while he’s busy with course in areas such as economics and Chinese, he hasn’t left boxing behind. He continues to practice occasionally with the Geneva team, and he’s been coaching some University friends, as well.
“I’m interested in starting a club,” he says.
