Built For success - Aspiring civil and medical engineer among JPS Foundation scholars

Civil engineering dreams for Paul Thomas Watson were moulded as a teenage labourer on construction sites, working alongside his father.

Now, days away from beginning his degree at the University of Technology (UTech), Watson fondly harkened back to his adolescence, when summer vacations exposed him to the fundamentals of building.

His namesake father, a high school science educator who took on part-time contractor jobs to make ends meet, would bring Watson and his elder brother, Paul Lincoln, to work on projects during weekends.

“That’s how I got to love construction, seeing things go from the stage of nothing to something,” shared the 22-year-old, an alumnus of Harrison Memorial High, a private secondary institution where his father taught.

He is among six recently awarded scholarship recipients, receiving $500,000 under the JPS Foundation’s Power Up East-West Power Grant. The selected students will pursue studies in the engineering faculty at the Old Hope Road-located tertiary institution.

“I started off doing small things like washing the concrete buckets and picking up the nails off the site,” Watson recalled before moving on to “mixing concrete and carrying buckets to put some extra money in my pockets during the holidays”.

Those summertime experiences lingered in his consciousness.

“I would have gotten to see from the planning, to the building of the foundation, to the casting of the blocks, to the decking of the roof, all the way to the structure being there. It fascinated me,” reminisced the UTech-bound student, who completed an associate degree in engineering at the Montego Bay Community College (MBCC) earlier this year.

“It was a joint degree with UTech where, if you maintain a 2.7 grade point average or above, upon completion of the course, you matriculate into your second year, so that’s the route I took,” he pointed out.

Beyond delighted to have made the JPS Foundation’s Class of 2026 shortlist of scholarship recipients, Watson revealed that the six-figure grant “will be a major help for his household”.

With his father recently retired, the financial onus on his registered nurse mother to cover tuition and associated educational expenses for him and his brother, who attends Northern Caribbean University, is now drastically lessened.

“Getting this scholarship would ease the burden off my little brother and release some of the financial strains on the household and focus money elsewhere,” he rationalised. “It [has allowed] us to save money for a rainy day in either my brother’s education, or mine and eases the mental pressure on the family because if the money isn’t there, parents are always left thinking of how they are going to provide.”

Watson said he became aware of the JPS Foundation Scholarship Programme last year after seeing promotions while scrolling through Instagram.

“I was just finishing my first year at MBCC, so it would not have applied to me at the time. I wrote down the scholarship and Foundation in notes on my phone and set an alarm for when the time came around again this year, so I would be on my feet to apply,” he explained.

After conducting his own research on the Foundation, Watson said he was pleased to discover its mentorship programme in particular. “[That] really resonated with me because I know how it feels having a mentor to look up to and guide you through life,” he noted.

Having applied back in June, he prayed about it but had honestly forgotten as one week led to another. That was until an incoming congratulatory email elicited unbridled joy.

“I was not only overjoyed because I knew the worth of the scholarship,” he shared in an interview following an awards ceremony hosted by the Foundation to fete 28 scholarship and grant awardees at The Jamaica Pegasus hotel in New Kingston last month.

“But, also because we now live in a country where things focusing on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), which are part of the Foundation’s main objectives, are becoming more in-demand.”

For the future civil engineer, whose stress relievers are playing football and the piano, listening to JPS President and Chief Executive Officer Hugh Grant recount his life journey at the awards event left an impact.

“When he told the audience of how all it took was for somebody to believe in him, and to believe in himself, that really resonated with me,” Watson noted.

“That’s because we tend to not see the people in the small corners who believe us. But once we believe in ourselves and believe in God, we can be successful in any task,” vowed the scholarship recipient.

Abrianna Greaves, aspiring biomedical engineer

Aiming to make her own mark of success is Abrianna Greaves.

The St Hilda’s Diocesan High graduate snagged one of six Power Up STEM Tertiary Scholarships from the JPS Foundation.

“It represents more than financial support to me,” the 18-year-old opined of the $400,000 monetary gift, renewable for four years based on maintained academic performance.

“It’s an investment in my future that allows me to more fully focus on my studies and pursuing my goal of becoming a biomedical engineer.”

Greaves, who served as president of her school’s JPS Power Up Energy Club, learnt of the Foundation’s scholarships after attending the Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) STEM workshops in January, which were co-funded by JPS.

“Then I saw in May on social media that the application portal was open, and I applied for the scholarship on June 15,” she disclosed.

When news came that she had made the cut of awardees, Greaves’ emotional response was a mix of excitement and gratitude.

“It was incredibly rewarding to know how my hard work, dedication and commitment to not only academics, but also community service had been recognised,” shared the youngest of four daughters of a dressmaker mother and mason father.

Raised in Dacre, St Ann, Greaves explained that her hometown has shaped her professional outlook.

“My ambition is to develop innovative medical technologies to improve patient care and make healthcare more accessible, especially in rural communities,” she said, while noting that the Alexandria Community Hospital fuelled her desire to enact meaningful change.

“It was a place I visited regularly due to my asthma but I was too little to take note of what was around me. Years later when I returned as a volunteer an entirely new perspective was unlocked to me. I now saw the outdated equipment, poor infrastructure and strain on medical professionals who had to work without proper medical equipment and tools”.

She is of the mind that she is currently “to be part of the solution” and combine her passion for science and engineering “to improve health outcomes and make a difference in my community and beyond”.

Programme enriched with psychosocial support

Head of the JPS Foundation Sophia Lewis is heartened by the willingness of recipients like Greaves and Watson to be changemakers for their country.

“What we have seen is that, in addition to financial aid, student recipients of the scholarships and grants we give, also benefit tremendously from having access to people who have already walked the path they are about to undertake,” she explained of the Foundation’s Mentorship Programme.

The mentor-mentee pairings between recipients and JPS executives, Lewis further noted, “is our way of ensuring that they have the requisite psychosocial support needed to take on this dynamic journey of high school and tertiary education”.

The programme sees direct engagement between mentors and mentees for a minimum of three sessions, while “outside of that, they will stay in touch and can connect with each other in their own time to ensure a sense of continued growth, accountability and support”.

This year, the Foundation received more than 1,000 applications for scholarships for high school and university-bound students across the island.

Approximately $6 million was expended on students across four categories under the 2026 Power Up Scholarship Programme.

The Power Up EWP Grant gave five UTech engineering students and one student from the College of Agriculture, Science and Education $500,000 each. Meanwhile, the Power Up STEM Tertiary Scholarship awarded three tertiary students and three teachers’ college students $400,000 each.

Ten students were awarded the Power Up Community Renewal PEP Grant, with each receiving $60,000.

The JPS Volunteers On Location To Serve PEP Scholarship gave three top PEP students $60,000 each.