Virginia Tech Advantage helps undergraduate focus on academics

PSI is the Presidential Scholarship Initiative, and this was a scholarship that I did not apply to, but I was awarded graduating high school. I'm a landscape architecture major. I do a lot of hand drawing, site plans, and master plans for different projects. I do a lot of classes on ecology, and it's also a lot of history, a lot of art. I don't think my education would be possible at Virginia Tech without PSI they help with a lot of things obviously cost of tuition they help me pay for my groceries my rent and a lot of the material costs that go into being an architecture major like printing materials for building models it is a lot of weight off my shoulders I don't have to work as much as I would have to I do still have to work a job but if I had to work enough to pay for my rent pay for all my groceries everything like that I would just be so swamped and stressed to all the time I can really focus on finding an internship that instead of necessarily a well-paying job that wouldn't support me over the summer my advisors have really helped me in planning towards my future whether that's like finding industry events for me to attend or people I could meet up with that they have connections to there's also we do a lot of travel they will help out with some of that and my program is special because we actually have a study abroad built into the program that is not necessarily required but it's definitely a huge help and it's really great to get that perspective and without PSI I definitely would not have been able to go on that trip. So being able to just pour all of my energy into my work is really important to me and I think has made all the difference.