Five college students with strong interests and skills in the craft of editing have won $8,500 in scholarships plus a chance to learn more from a national editors conference. The support comes from fundraising by ACES: The Society for Editing.
Finalists in the scholarship competition wrote an essay about editing, summarized samples of writing and took a timed editing test.
The top winner, Aileen Houston, is a graduate student majoring in English at Northern Arizona University. She has worked as a technical editor specializing in research-based publications for the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. She has also edited for the American Association for Justice, and earned a bachelor’s degree in theater and creative writing at Washington College.
Houston’s scholarship is for $2,500.
The other four students, receiving $1,500 scholarships, are:
• Lillian Barkley, a University of Illinois journalism major (now a graduate student) and editor-in-chief of the Daily Illini, managing more than 150 students. She has been an intern for The New York Times, Seventeen Magazine and the World YWCA in Geneva, Switzerland.
• Chandler Boese, a senior at the University of Kansas majoring in journalism plus English literature. She is editor-in-chief of the University Daily Kansan and a consultant for the university’s writing center. For her third internship, Boese will be editing at the Dallas Morning News this summer.
• Kaitlin Coward, an Ohio University senior with specializations in health and French. She is managing editor of The Post, an independent student news outlet with a staff of 100 and has been a copy editing intern at The New York Times.
• Elizabeth Kenney, who is pursuing a master's degree from Emerson College in publishing and writing, and then a career in book editing. She has worked as an editor and content manager in Germany and has a bachelor's degree in English from McGill University in Montreal.
In addition to the scholarships, the winners receive financial support to attend ACES’ three-day skill-building conference, which this year will be in Chicago in April.
Financial support for the winners comes mostly in donations from members of ACES, an alliance of editors working at websites, Fortune 500 companies, newspapers, magazines, nonprofits and other businesses, as well as freelance editors, students and their professors. Over the years, the ACES Education Fund has awarded a total of 99 scholarships to students who have a passion for editing.
You can find more information and the names of past scholarship recipients on the ACES website.
