Holy Cross Student Awarded Prestigious CBS Scholarship visualarts-news

WORCESTER, Mass. – Iris Chin Ponte, a junior at Holy Cross, has been selected as one of just 18 scholarship winners nationwide for the CBS Foundation Scholarship Program.  The award carries with it a $2,500 scholarship.

The CBS Foundation Scholarship Program was designed to recognize and assist minority men and women who are interested in pursuing careers in broadcast communications in the areas of production, broadcast journalism, programming or technical operations.

Ponte, of Belmont, Mass., is a psychology major/Chinese minor.  She is active on a number of boards and committees, the founder of Holy Cross Television, a member of the varsity crew team and the female a cappella group, The Delilahs.

In January, she will travel to Beijing, China, where she will study for a semester.  She is planning to use the money she receives from the scholarship to purchase a laptop computer and a digital camera.

A member of the College's Honors Program, Ponte chose to do her thesis on a comparative study of children in pre-schools in China and the United States.  She decided on this topic after reading Joseph J. Tobin's Preschool in Three Cultures: Japan, China, and the United States (Yale University Press, 1991) and realizing that research had not been done since the late 1980s.

Last summer she was an intern at Children's Television Workshop in New York, where she worked for Sesame Street Research in both the office and the field.  There, she was able to integrate her knowledge of psychology with her love of children.

While graduation is still a year away, Ponte says that she would like to continue to work in the media, creating educational children's programs for either Children's Television Workshop or Nickelodeon.

Founded in 1953, the CBS Foundation embodies the ideals of CBS and its history as one of the leading producers and distributors of entertainment and information programming.  Since its inception in 1991, this program has provided more than $645,000 in scholarships for 344 students.