Jackson Family Endowed Scholarship

Nan Jackson, retired mathematics professor, established the Jackson Family Endowment in memory of her parents, M. Barbara Jackson and J. David Jackson, and in gratitude for her 25-year teaching career at Lansing Community College.

Thanks to her parents, Nan and her siblings had the opportunity to travel starting at a young age, in a family that encouraged the study of languages. She spent her fifth-grade year in Geneva, Switzerland, while her father worked as a physicist at C.E.R.N. There she had the occasion to practice her beginning French skills. Nan continued to study the French language and literature in high school and college while majoring in geology with a minor in mathematics. All of these interests came together in the landscape of the pre-Saharan region of Morocco where she served as a Peace Corps volunteer teaching mathematics at a provincial lycee after her graduation from college. STEM subjects at the high school were taught in French, and other subjects in Arabic. Although Nan had never intended to become a teacher, her Peace Corps experience led to a life­long career in mathematics education.

It would be easy to imagine that Nan’s interest in mathematics was influenced by her father’s career as a theoretical physicist, but what Nan remembers are her mother’s stories about her love for spherical trigonometry, a subject rarely taught today that Barbara excelled at in her last year of high school. Barbara also conveyed to her children a love of language and literature, both English and French. While her children were growing up, Barbara returned to school as a non-traditional student, eventually earning a degree in French and graduating from college the same year as Nan’s older brother, whose major included Greek and Latin. (Nan’s younger brother also studied Greek and Latin and is fluent in Spanish. Nan’s sister majored in Russian and is fluent in Turkish.)

In establishing the Jackson Family Endowment, Nan honors a family legacy of interest in world languages and the careers she and her father enjoyed in STEM fields.

Qaulifications

• Recipients shall be enrolled in a World Languages program or a Science, Technology, Engineering or Mathematics (STEM) program at LCC
• Recipients shall be enrolled for a minimum of 6 credits
• Preference shall be given to applicants who express interest in both World Languages and STEM
• Financial need will be considered