Cheering on new Eagles

Linda Stephens (Class of 1979) is a passionate MSU supporter, with a soft spot for athletics. Her Eagle pride led her to create the Linda J. Stephens Scholarship Fund. The fund supports students who have completed the Success Academy program. Designed to help transition students from high school to college life, the Success Academy helps incoming Eagles develop learning habits to set them up for success – a program Linda is proud to support.

A U.S. Army veteran who served from 1984 to 1992, including a deployment to Saudi Arabia during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield, Linda knows about hard work. To reward the diligence of students in the Success Academy, her scholarship provides an award of $1,000 to a student each year, and cheers from Linda on the sidelines as they become Eagles.

Breaking financial barriers

John (Class of 1979) and Peggy (Class of 1979) Osborne recognized the barriers students face in completing their degrees. They created the John and Peggy Osborne Scholarship Endowment to help business students overcome these hurdles.

Peggy completed her MBA at MSU in 1979. Both John and Peggy became faculty in the Smith College of Business & Technology. Both retired after 27 and 34 years of service, respectively. John passed away in 2021, and Peggy remains an involved and committed member of the MSU community.

“MSU was such a big part of our lives, we feel like this scholarship is a small way we can continue to support the students and the University,” Peggy said. “We love MSU.”

Scholarship support adds up

For Ryan Elmore (Class of 1995), his experience at Morehead State helped him see the beauty mathematics and statistics. As a student in the Department of Mathematics he was inspired by the ways math could be applied in daily life and in professional careers and appreciated how scholarship support helped to lessen his financial burden.

An associate professor in the Department of Business Information & Analytics at the University of Denver, he is also an associate editor at the Journal of Quantitative Analysis in Sports and an award-winning researcher in sports statistics.

To honor his MSU experience, he created the Ryan Elmore Scholarship Fund, a fund that provides a scholarship award to a student within the Data Analytics Program.