Julie Cho and Sarah Dolan are the first recipients of Carleton’s Cristine Rotenberg Scholarship for Academic and Creative Pursuits, an award funded by popular Youtuber Cristine Rotenberg.
Rotenberg, known through her YouTube channel Simply Nailogical, announced the Cristine Rotenberg Scholarship for Acdemic and Creative Pursuits for Carleton students in a YouTube video in October 2021.
The scholarship is for students who are passionate about pursuing their creative interests alongside their academics and selected recipients will receive a financial award of $3,000.
Cho and Dolan each received a $3,000 award in January during the SOAR Student Leadership Conference.
Cho, a third-year student commerce student, said she felt honoured to receive the scholarship. Cho is a multidisciplinary artist who works with a variety of media from drawing, ink painting, sculpture, writing and theatre.
“Sometimes post-secondary, and just education in general, can be very prescriptive,” Cho said. “Having a different way of thinking about things that isn’t so rigid can give you a skill set for how you critically think about things.”
Dolan is a fourth-year engineering student, artist and musician. She plays the harp, draws, paints and writes songs and poetry.
“It’s amazing to have these artistic things recognized because it’s not like there aren’t artistic people in engineering,” Dolan said.
For students, Dolan said it can be hard to prioritize your artistic interests.
“When you spend all day, every day doing calculations and copying formulas, these creative endeavours take a backseat and you feel like they’re not important,” Dolan said.
To apply, students were required to outline their academic and creative goals and why their creative passion is important to them. The application included a digital portfolio alongside social media or website links.
Rotenberg created an online blog for nail art in 2014 while finishing her master’s degree at Carleton. Rotenberg said the blog gave her a creative outlet while she was completing her studies, which she would not have been able to do without the financial assistance and scholarships she received.
“The goal of the scholarship is to provide some financial support to students who are committed to their academic studies [and] creative passion outside of their academic program,” Rotenberg said. “Tuition is costly and people put their creative passions on hold.”
In an email statement to the Charlatan, Rotenberg said she wanted to promote education because she saw how it was sometimes discouraged on social media.
“It felt like it was trendy on social media to explicitly discourage people from caring about school, and I wanted to counter that by supporting higher education,” Rotenberg wrote in the email.
Supporting higher education is not a new interest for Rotenberg.
“I’ve been doing informal ‘tuition giveaways’ on social media since 2017. Each year, I would select a few of my subscribers who were students in Canada and help them with their tuition costs,” Rotenberg said.
Evelyn Maeder is a criminology professor at Carleton University who taught Rotenberg when she was a student. Maeder was introduced in the scholarship’s announcement video as Simply Proflogical.
“I think it’s really cool that [Rotenberg is] doing this for Carleton,” Maeder said. “A lot of people have a lot of success after they’ve graduated and they don’t think about going back to their alma mater and doing something for the students who are there now.”
Teddy Kozela, manager of student mental health and well-being at Carleton, presented the scholarship at the conference.
Kozela said SOAR was chosen as the venue to award the scholarship because the scholarship aims to celebrate community leaders.
“This will now become a staple part of the conference and hopefully will also promote the opportunity these awards provide for students so that even more students can apply in future years,” Kozela said.
Featured graphic by Sara Mizannojehdehi.
