NATIONAL CARTOONISTS SOCIETY student scholarships

Hello all,

The holiday season has started! and the semester is ending! so I'll be posting far more regularly.
I am pleased with how the first semester 'shook down' and will duplicate the timetable for assignments in the second one. I like the fact that my colleagues and I schedule our assignments so that they are not all due at the same time. We're also working 'cross platform' as it were. For example, students use the storyboards drawn in my course in Layout class when they do workbook and layouts. This is precisely the way things happen on a professional production. I'll be working closely on converging assignments with Peter Emslie (character design) and Mark Mayerson (animation) in the coming semester.
And I'm currently waiting for some news on the second book proposal, so watch this space...there should be an update sometime next week.
Now to the meat of the matter: there's a great new scholarship out there from the NATIONAL CARTOONISTS SOCIETY that is open to any college student in the USA, Canada or Mexico who will be a Junior or Senior in the 2009-2010 school year.
(I had to rephrase this as 'third or fourth year' to translate this into Canadian English) The student does not have to be an art major, though it certainly helps.
The NCS is a great group. I've been a member since 1980 and was once the general membership chairman. Al Jaffee of MAD magazine nominated me for the post when I was only 25 years old. As I was basking in the glory, he said, "Don't get a swelled head. I only nominated you because you show up to all the meetings!" Despite this I think I managed to do a good job.
The NCS was once only a New York phenomenon but it is now really an international organization; they even once had a foreign President (Lynn Johnston moved the cartoon 'capitol' to Toronto during her Presidency and was the first female President as well.)
The Milt Gross Fund was originally established as an emergency fund for cartoonists' widows. It has changed over the years to become a last-resort fund for cartoonists in economic difficulty. For years I and the rest of the New York chapter drew caricatures at the Bank of New York (long gone) and the telephone company offices on 42nd street (still there) in exchange for donations to the Fund.
The Fund was named for the famous cartoonist, who was also one of the earliest members of the NCS.
Well, the Milt Gross Fund received very generous grants from King Features in memory of the late syndicate editor Jay Kennedy and donations from prominent cartoonists that you can read about here; The Jay Kennedy Award college scholarship was awarded for the first time in 2008 and won by this student from the Rhode Island School of Design.
The current contest closes in February, 2009 so I have notified all of my Second Year Storyboard students about it, and I'm now posting the information here. Try your luck, you won't regret it. The winner gets to go to the Reuben Awards Ceremony (The cartoon Oscars), which will be held this year in Los Angeles; and there is a financial component too. Best of all, the NCS judges may award more than one scholarship at their discretion, so it's definitely worth trying for.