Tuba

Tuba’s parents brought their family here from Pakistan two days after 9/11. The next day her father started his job as a cab driver, working seven days a week from noon to 3 A.M. with a break to join his family for dinner, a schedule he kept until it was interrupted by the Covid pandemic. “My Mom worked all day to sustain our house and look after three children,” Tuba wrote, adding, “I never heard either of them complain.” “I will work hard,” she said, “to prove that their sacrifices were not in vain.” Commuting from her apartment in the Bronx to school in Downtown Manhattan, she has been doing just that. She is in the top ranks of her class. “But,” one of her teachers wrote, “it was in her junior year that she really began to shine” when she wrote and presented “a paper arguing how we could change gun laws to make America safer. It was by far the best presentation I participated in that semester.” Now, Tuba says, the time has come “for breaking out of my shell, my bubble. Time for me to have my own adventures, to discover myself in the next four years.” Asked about what attracted her to Scholarship Plus, she replied: “To really chase down opportunities, having friendly faces behind me would help me become the best I could be.”

"The teacher who made the greatest difference in my life,” Tuba wrote, “is Alisa Dutkiewicz,” who taught several history, government and economics courses and was her advisor over all four years. “She really shaped me into the best student I can be, never doubting my potential."  

Tuba is a Marshall Goldberg Scholar, an honor given to a student who is driven to change the world. Thank you to Marshall Goldberg and donors to the Marshall Goldberg Fund.