R-TV student snags $10k in scholarships

photo by Luke George

R-TV student Melissa Ragels, who has won $10,000 in scholarships, operates a camera in the TV production studio.

By Tyler Christensen
J-School Web Reporter

For Melissa Ragels, a Radio-Television student at The University of Montana’s School of Journalism, the good fortune just keeps raining down.

Ragels learned this summer that she won a $5,000 Fisher Communications Scholarship for Minorities – an award that follows another $5,000 scholarship she received in May.

Ragels, a member of the Spirit Lake Nation in North Dakota, was awarded the first scholarship, the Ralph and Hulda Fields Scholarship, at the 47th Annual Dean Stone Night Awards.

“I went to school to be a nurse; I went to school to help people, but I just wasn’t good at it,” said the 29-year-old mother of two from Wolf Point. “So I took a step back to really look at it and say ‘OK, Melissa, what can you do well that’s going to really help people?’ ”

The answer: Pursue a career in journalism.

Ragels began her pursuit with some vigorous research. She toured the UM campus and called professor Bill Knowles, who would teach her first journalism class at UM in the fall of 2003.

"She very good and she definitely deserves the scholarship,” said Knowles, whom Ragels now names as her favorite teacher.

Knowles said he knew from that first phone conversation that Ragels would be a successful journalist. They ended up talking for more than an hour, he said.

“We had a long discussion about the philosophy of broadcast journalism,” Knowles remembered. “I could tell from that one phone call she was good and she was going to be good.”

Ragels’ journalistic dedication and determination was also revealed to him over the course of his Introduction to Mass Media class. Ragels was there every morning at 8 a.m., listening from the front row.

“She just had the spark. She knew what she wanted to do,” Knowles said.

Ragels had to move her family from Fort Peck, where she attended community college, to Missoula, and it wasn’t an easy transition at first. They had to live in a motel for about a month, Ragels had to draw out of her retirement fund and her husband left behind the family business.

“Our family really sacrificed in that month of August,” said Ragels.

However, things picked up quickly. Ragels’ husband, Norman Ragels, was able to find a job, University Housing called to say they had one apartment left and her daughter, 9-year-old Miranda, made a smooth transition to her new school.

Norman Ragels is grateful for the added help the scholarships will provide their family, he said. And he wants to see his wife continue her career in broadcast journalism.

“If she didn’t get it, we would really be struggling,” he said. “Melissa’s happy. It’s the first time I’ve ever really seen her enjoy what she doing.”

Part of the reason Ragels enjoys her journalism classes so much is because they’re helping her become the person she wants to be, she said.

“It’s very important to me to be a positive Native American woman, “ she added. “I want to be a role model. You don’t see Native American women in this profession.”

Ragels remembered how, growing up on the Fort Peck reservation, her peers rarely thought of succeeding outside the immediate community.

“Not a lot of Native American women make it off, because, like me, they have children young,” Ragels said. However, “if even three people will look up to me and say ‘That Native American woman can make it off the res, so can I,’” Ragels will consider her duty fulfilled, she said.

She also works toward her goal of helping people by acting as a mentor for UM’s American Indian Student Support Services, a program that helps guide incoming native students during their academic careers here.

“I’m turning the next chapter of my life,” she said.

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