Two Miles Mac students land $100,000 scholarships

East Kildonan

Two students from Miles Macdonell Collegiate have been awarded the prestigious Schulich Leaders Scholarship worth $100,000 each.

Close friends, Melind Bhroat and Daniel Berezovskyi will both attend university on full rides this fall.

Bhroat had just pulled into the school’s parking lot when he received the news that he will be attending University of Waterloo — his dream school — to study science and business.

“I was ecstatic and overwhelmed with joy,” said Bhroat, 17. He described how he got out of his car, and ran up and down the sidewalk. The scholarship was “liberating” as he described it, and won’t have to worry about being in a student debt.

For Bhroat, the scholarship will help him pursue this passion to help people. He hopes to eventually work in agriculture — specifically hydroponic farming — to help address food insecurity in northern or Arctic communities.

That desire to help people goes way back to watching his parents help people in the community as he was growing up. Immigrants from India, his parents worked multiple jobs to support the family while still finding ways to show up for those around them.

“They were always putting others before themselves,” he said.

He remembers his mom kept Costco cookies in the glove box, and whenever they spotted someone on the street, they’d hand a pack out the window. Bhroat eventually picked up the tradition himself.

He explained it’s also the way their faces lit up whenever he offers help to people, that motivates him to keep on helping them.

A few months ago, he was driving, and he handed cookies to someone. They looked up and said: “The cookie lady’s back.”

“I’m not a lady,” Bhroat laughed, “but the fact that my mom left such an impact on their life — that really is an inspiration.”

The two students became close through their shared interests — serving as co-presidents of the engineering club and spending time together at math club.

Berezovskyi, 17, will be going to McGill University as an honours mathematics major.

Berezovskyi was sitting in biology class when the news came through. He was too shocked to read past the first two lines — he just looked up and started trying to get the attention of his twin sister, Lisa Berezovska, from across the room.

Then when he told his mom, she cried.

“Our income isn’t too great,” Berezovskyi explained, adding that he waited two months for the result, a nerve-wracking time for him as he worried about his family’s finances.

With that, he explained that both Lisa and him were graduating and off to university at the same time, making the $100,000 scholarship a significant relief for his parents.

Berezovskyi comes from a Ukrainian immigrant family. His parents — a civil engineer and a cardiologist — were already too old to get recertified in their fields in Canada, according to him. They now work in construction.

But his mother made sure their education stayed central.

“She pushed for rigour at home,” said Berezovskyi. His mother held them to a high standard — she wanted them to go further and beyond a master’s, a PhD, he added.

Berezovskyi’s interest in mathematics started out as a little seed implanted in his heart by his math teacher back in sixth grade during a parent-teacher conference.

“He told me I was very talented in math,” said Berezovskyi “I think just those words of encouragement — small things like those compliments —helped me develop my passion.”

Berezovskyi said he hasn’t been able to run into that teacher ever since, but he hopes to one day.

Bhroat and Berezovskyi’s friendship had played a part when it came to the scholarship. Initially, only one of them was set to be nominated — but Daniel brought to the attention to their teacher, Kathryn Amato, that the school could nominate two students. Because a student from Miles Mac had won the scholarship before, a clause in the criteria allowed the school to have two nominees the following year.

It will be the first time that the school had two students win the scholarship in the same year.