Rise Above
How Seton Hall's Resilience, Integrity, Scholarship and Excellence Program turned Catherine Pham into a leader.
Catherine Pham’s journey to Seton Hall began in the fall of 2020. Covid was raging. Pham’s high school in Brooklyn, New York, where she grew up and had lived with her father until recently, had switched to virtual instruction, and Pham had decided on a change of scenery for her senior year. She went to stay with her mother in Newark, New Jersey, and helped out at her mother’s cafe, which remained open for first responders. “My laptop would be running as I was blending smoothies,” Pham recalls of juggling work and studies.
Pham was chatting about college with a customer who wondered if she’d given any thought to Seton Hall . After receiving a letter in the mail, she looked up the university and learned about a program called RISE — short for Resilience, Integrity, Scholarship and Excellence.
RISE provides financial, academic and social support to low-income and first-generation college students, as well as students who use disability services.
Pham applied. “I told my brothers, if all goes well and they accept me into this RISE program, I’ll go to Seton Hall.” Months later, Pham found herself with a stack of acceptance letters befitting her strong academic record. Seton Hall offered the best academic scholarship plus an additional amount through RISE, a sum that covered the cost of textbooks while mitigating the rising price of annual tuition in excess of her primary scholarship. But it wasn’t just the funding that clinched Pham’s decision.
“During my interview,” she tells IMPACT, “the assistant director for the program was talking about how RISE goes beyond a community — it’s more like a family. That stuck in my head. I didn’t know if I could find people who care this way at a bigger university.”
Pham is one of more than 170 students to date who have benefitted from RISE, now in its fifth year. The program is modeled on the federal TRiO Student Support Services grant, and is supported by several sources, including individual donors like Tom Tran ’78, who made a $500,000 gift to initially endow the scholarships in 2023.
Every success I’ve had outside the RISE Program, I’ve been able to trace it back to it.”
Decades ago, Seton Hall had taken a chance on Tran — now a seasoned healthcare executive— when he arrived in New Jersey as an 18-year-old Vietnamese refugee in 1975. He wanted to repay his alma mater by providing funds to help students like Pham, herself the daughter of Vietnamese immigrants. As Tran previously told Seton Hall magazine, “Without Seton Hall, I wouldn’t have gotten to where I am now.”
Born in 2003, Pham grew up in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood and attended New York City Public Schools. She practiced martial arts in elementary and middle school and then played volleyball in high school, where she excelled in subjects like AP chemistry and AP biology. She fell in love with reading and writing through an American literature class. She was a member of the sewing club, comic book club and peer mediation. And she was one of three students in her grade who registered for an engineering class, in which she built a structurally sound chair using only cardboard.
“From elementary through high school, there was nothing hard about school,” says Pham. “I was able to pick up things super easily.”
Catherine Pham with her RISE cohort
As college drew near, however, Pham felt unprepared. In the passenger seat of her brother’s 2012 Honda Accord as he drove her to orientation on the morning of August 25, 2021, Pham’s stomach filled with butterflies. She’d become acquainted with her RISE cohort during a three-week virtual program earlier in the summer, but she had no idea what they’d think of her in person, or she of them. At the same time, she was filled with excitement and hope about the opportunities RISE could provide. Those words from her conversation with the assistant director replayed in her mind: It’s more like a family.
Pham arrived on campus and found her way to the RISE headquarters . As she walked in, her nerves subsided at the sight of a giant whiteboard that said, “Welcome to RISE.” Her RISE class included roughly 50 students, and she immediately connected with the group.
They bonded over shared experiences like coming from immigrant families and growing up in lower income neighborhoods. They hung out all day and then grabbed a bite at Miti Miti, a Latin joint in downtown South Orange. As Pham recalls, “That’s when I felt like, OK, this is home.”
Pham, who opted to live with her mother to save money, speaks highly of RISE workshops she took in areas like financial literacy and résumé-building. But the program’s most meaningful benefits were the more personal ones.
“My advisor would always have check-ins with me,” says Pham, who likewise hit it off with the first-year mentor RISE paired her with, a “ball of sunshine” senior named Jasmyne Emerson. “I was terrified of college,” says Pham. “She made everything less scary.” Emerson even inspired Pham to become a RISE mentor herself. “It didn’t really click to me what the mentor job was until the moment I had one of my students come to me and cry about something, and I was like, I’m really here for you.”
Pham eventually became a mentor coordinator, a job that entails everything from organizing schedules and liaising with Seton Hall’s professional staff, to disseminating information through email and social media channels. (Pham revamped @setonhall_rise on Instagram.) Her work as a RISE tutor for business students — she’s a finance/marketing double major with a minor in economics — has been equally rewarding.
“As I’m tutoring,” she says, “it solidifies all this information in my brain, because I learn best when I teach other people. So I was able to push forward in all my other classes.”
With her four years at Seton Hall and RISE coming to an end, Pham is looking confidently to the future. She aspires to work in marketing, either in beauty or sports . Her ultimate goal? CMO or CEO. In the meantime, she already has a job lined up: the country club where Pham works as a server offered her a full-time marketing position upon graduation.
If RISE didn’t exist, Pham’s time at Seton Hall would have been a lot different. “I would have just gone to my classes and gone straight home,” she says. “I wouldn’t be on campus at all. College would just be something to get done rather than something to look forward to.”
In other words, RISE completely transformed Pham’s Seton Hall experience. What would she say to the donors who made that possible? “It’s such a big help in even the smallest ways. These funds keep the program running, and they give students the opportunity to have resources that go way beyond money.”
