Mike Rowe Scholarship Highlights the Lost Virtues of Hard Work and SweatThere are thousands of Tracy Wilsons out there attending community colleges, trade schools, and apprenticeship programs, eager to show their value, even when so many do not acknowledge it.
By Salena Zito
February 21, 2022
LUSBY, Maryland—Tracy Wilson is sitting in the cutest little ranch house in this Calvert County town. It is her dream house—literally her dream house, she explains, as she has had the image of this very home in her mind, down to the color scheme of the exterior.
It is 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and the single mother of two just got home from another dream—her job. She spends her days working as an instrumentation technician in the flight test program at Boeing.
“I get to spend my days working on F-18s,” she exclaims several times during the interview. She says it with such joy that her appreciation for her craft becomes infectious.
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Several months into her education, Wilson found out about the Work Ethic Scholarship Program from the Mike Rowe WORKS Foundation. The program provides financial support to students enrolled in trade school training programs who have demonstrated a continuing commitment to personal responsibility, a positive attitude, and a strong work ethic.
“I was like, ‘Hey, I am a huge ‘Dirty Jobs’ fan,'” she said of Rowe’s wildly popular Discovery Channel show, in which he does every trade job created that makes the clocks, trains, planes, and automobiles run on time and keeps your toilet flushing, too. Rowe made a reality show out of unglamorous yet essential jobs that make everyone’s lives safer and more comfortable. He brought to the forefront not just their existence but also the value these jobs have for the people who do them.
Rowe said in an interview that he was inspired to create the scholarship fund in the summer of 2008. “‘Dirty Jobs’ was a runaway hit, the country was entering a recession, unemployment was headline news,” he said. “But everywhere I went on ‘Dirty Jobs,’ I saw ‘Help Wanted’ signs. It slowly dawned on me that high unemployment did not necessarily stem from a lack of opportunity. I remember being surprised to learn that 2.3 million jobs were open when the unemployment rate surpassed 10 percent.”
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/21/mike-rowe-scholarship-highlights-the-lost-virtues-of-hard-work-and-sweat/
