Leslie Nava, Aerospace Engineer and Scholarship Winner

Wake Up

From Dallas to Daytona Beach to Atlanta, Leslie Nava has traveled far and wide in pursuit of her greatest dream: to represent fellow Latinas in the field of aviation as a pilot and engineer. With Scholarships.com’s help, she’s earned over $100,000 to do just that.

Originally from the countryside of Fort Worth— a place she lovingly calls “Cow Town”— Nava’s educational path was not always straightforward. Some STEM resources were available to her, but often, she needed to reach long distances to find connections in her particular field of study.

To compound the issue, her high school was brand new. Very few clubs and organizations that were relevant to Nava’s interests existed when she enrolled. She saw the lack of opportunities not as a setback, however, but as an opportunity.

“It was like a blank canvas ready to be painted,” she said. “[I wanted to] take initiative and start building these clubs and leadership positions.”

“Scholarships.com doesn’t overcrowd your emails,” said Nava. “Other scholarship sites will send 5 emails in 3 days; Scholarships.com will send emails once a week [with] upcoming scholarship deadlines."

So Nava poured her passion into establishing groups that would both enhance her community and allow her to gain valuable leadership experience. She created her school’s dance club and led a community service project for campus safety; she founded a new chapter of the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. On top of all this, she consistently won awards for her academic performance, even taking up the role of student representative for her school district.

It was in Nava’s junior year of high school that she settled on aerospace engineering as her ultimate career goal. Her older sister was in the middle of her college application process; Nava joined her on a college visit to Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, and from then on, she was set.

“So, okay, college is an option, right?” she recalled thinking. “But then I looked at the prices. My parents don’t make 6 figures to pay for this… we could barely even handle our rent.”

Though they did their best to support their children in every academic endeavor, Nava’s parents had never had the resources to attain college degrees of their own; she knew she would need to fight extra hard to secure her future in aerospace engineering as a first-generation college student. With her parents’ encouragement, Nava began looking for opportunities like science fairs, contests, networking events, and application-based awards to fund her education.

“Competitions might be time-consuming, but scholarships? I could do that on my own time,” she said. “I treated it like a job; I started looking, researching, putting them on a spreadsheet I created, and that’s when I eventually came upon Scholarships.com.”

On Scholarships.com, Nava was able to find hyper-specific scholarships tailored to her circumstances. She matched with awards based on her interest in aviation, her Hispanic background, and even her hometown. Awards she wasn’t eligible for were automatically filtered away.

“I wasn’t going to study medicine, so it wouldn’t show me those; I wasn’t going to serve in the military, so it wouldn’t show me those either,” said Nava. “It was really good at summarizing the type of scholarships I could apply for and have the highest chances of winning.”

In addition to the automatic matching system, though, Scholarships.com helped Nava manage the most precious resource of all: time.

“You just log in, you find a scholarship that interests you, and just click on it to see the deadline, the amount, and the description. Then if you’re interested, just click on the link and you’re already set to go,” she explained.

“[Scholarships.com] was really good at summarizing the type of scholarships I could apply for and have the highest chances of winning,” said Nava.

Thanks to Scholarships.com’s efficiency, Nava could keep up with her scholarship applications while she applied to colleges and networked to gain more insight into the field of aviation. She spent her free time taking advantage of every opportunity that came her way.

“I went to a meeting at a barbecue shop and met my flight instructor there,” she said. At an International Organization of Women Pilots event in Dallas, Nava stopped into a restaurant and met a woman who owned a plane. “I ask, ‘Oh, are you a flight instructor?’” Nava recounted. “She’s like, ‘Yeah, you want to start flying?’”

When senior year finally rolled around, Nava had a solid plan for her education. She would follow in the footsteps of the previous year’s Valedictorian and attend Georgia Institute of Technology to study aerospace engineering— and with Scholarships.com’s help, she was determined to do it without student debt.

“The first clutch is what pumped me up,” she said. When she won the Hispanic Heritage Foundation Youth Award for Engineering, the celebration event was legendary. “They had these huge cameras. I felt like I was important, like red carpet style.”

The confidence boost from winning that first award encouraged Nava to keep applying; Scholarships.com’s reminders went a long way to help her.

“Scholarships.com doesn’t overcrowd your emails,” said Nava. “Other scholarship sites will send 5 emails in 3 days; Scholarships.com will send emails once a week [with] upcoming scholarship deadlines… I just started applying to every single scholarship that was out there, because be it $1,000, $500, or $800, every single dollar matters.”

As more and more wins rolled in, so too did college acceptance letters: “I got accepted to every single college I applied to,” Nava said. Georgia Tech offered her admission with Dean’s Scholar honors. Before making her final decision, she and her parents traveled to Atlanta for an on-campus event to be sure it was the right choice.

“Not only were [my parents] the youngest parents there, but also, we were the only Hispanics,” she recalled. “My dad saw that as a challenge. He said, ‘You’re going to stay here. You’re going to start representing us.’”

Now a sophomore thriving at Georgia Tech, Nava couldn’t be happier with her decision. The awards she’s won through Scholarships.com have helped her to create a brighter future for first-generation and Latina students of aviation everywhere.

“You just log in, you find a scholarship that interests you, and just click on it to see the deadline, the amount, and the description. Then if you’re interested, just click on the link and you’re already set to go,” Nava explained.

“I have no loans in my name. My parents haven’t paid for anything,” said Nava. “I have more time to focus on my studies and my personal passions. I want to create a nonprofit; I’m working on that. I want to create social media content; I’m working on that.”

“These scholarships don’t only give you money,” she went on. “They give you the resources to figure out what type of impact you want to have on your community and your life.”

Ultimately, Nava’s advice for other students is to wake up— because, she says, “if you just stay asleep, you’ll never realize what the day has to offer you.”

“Stop resisting and start existing,” Nava concluded. “You might think that you’re not capable, but you never know unless you put yourself in that situation. Be uncomfortable.”