When Tamara Matthews told her family that she was leaving her lucrative job as an automotive engineer and project manager to become a teacher, some relatives thought she should have a psychiatric evaluation.

“I married into a family of educators, and they all thought I was crazy for wanting to pursue teaching,” says Matthews, a full-time mathematics teacher for Covenant House Academy Central in Detroit.  “The money was great in my previous career, but I wanted to do something more meaningful.”

Matthews was able to transition into urban education after being accepted into the first cohort of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows program at WSU in 2010.  She and 13 others from the first class recently completed the program, and have all been placed in schools throughout Southeast Michigan.

The 2013 class was announced on July 15. The 16 aspiring educators selected for WSU’s program will each receive $30,000 to complete a specially designed master’s program based on a year-long classroom experience.

The Kellogg Foundation launched the Michigan fellowships in 2009 to recruit and train teachers with strong math and science backgrounds, and place them in middle and high schools across the state.

For more information, visit wayne.edu/wwfellowship.