WHO  IS  JESSICA  CLARK  TAYON,  you might ask?

 

Jessica Clark Tayon from Erda, Utah, dreamed of following in her daddy's footsteps and becoming a wildlife biologist, but she never got to fully realize that dream. Jessi passed away on January 15, 2007 at the age of twenty-one from respiratory complications following a seven-year battle with cancer. At the time of her death, Jessi was a junior at Utah State University in Logan, majoring in wildlife science. At USU she was a Dean's list student, a Quinney Scholar, and active in the student leadership of the College of Natural Resources.  In high school she'd been a Sterling Scholar in Science, Academic Olympian, National Honor Society member, chapter president of the Future Business Leaders of America, and played basketball and softball.

 

Jessi loved to camp and hunt and fish, first with her dad, and later with her husband Scott, to whom she was married for just five months before she passed away.  Despite her young age, Jessi got to do a lot of stuff people who love wildlife just dream about doing . . .  At age eight, she kept black bear cubs warm in her jacket while the mama bear was radio-collared.  As a teenager, Jessi was a volunteer and later an employee of the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources. She conducted bird surveys along the Great Salt Lake with her dad, raised and rehabbed a kestrel fledgling, boiled thousands of bobcat jaws to extract teeth for aging, captured and banded Canada geese, collected biological samples from deer at hunter check stations, helped with moose transplants, and participated in the first black-footed ferret transplant in Utah.  In college she worked three summers around Ely, Nevada, Deseret Land and Livestock, and the Cache Valley, using telemetry to track elk, sage grouse and deer.  She enjoyed hunting deer and pronghorn.  She loved to shoot with shotguns, rifles, handguns, and cameras was a crack shot with all of them.

 

Jessi  was diagnosed with squamous cell cancer of the esophagus and trachea when she was just fourteen years old, a freshman at Grantsville High.  No one has figured out how a healthy, athletic teenager could develop this kind of cancer.  Jessi had three big open-chest surgeries and over forty smaller surgeries, weeks of chemo and radiation, and spent waaay too much time at University Hospital.  She did most of the aforementioned activities between bouts of surgery and illness. Jessi could be in the ICU on a ventilator on Sunday and back to class or work on Monday, and nobody except her family and doctors would know a thing about it.  That's just the way she wanted it.  She had trouble breathing and eating, but this girl was feisty, and through it all she kept her sense of humor . . . and her smile . . . and her faith in God.  

 

When Jessica passed away, her husband and her parents thought it would be a fitting tribute to establish a scholarship in her name

 

for future wildlife students at Utah State University.  Nearly enough money has been raised to endow this scholarship, meaning that the scholarship awards will come from the interest generated on the principle and should continue "in perpetuity."

 

Jessi would be pleased to know that there are "Tayon Scholars" at Utah State, carrying on in wildlife where she had to leave off. 

 

 

DONATIONS  MAY  BE  SENT  TO:

Jessica Clark Tayon Memorial Scholarship Fund

c/o College of Natural Resources

Utah State University

Logan, UT  84322

 

  

TO  APPLY  FOR  THIS  SCHOLARSHIP,

go to www.cnr.usu.edu/htm/students/cnr-scholarships to connect with Utah State's College of Natural Resources, where you can complete an application form. 

 

 

 

     
     
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