TruFit Scholarship winner Veronica Swain

Ned Handy, President, Citizens Bank, Connecticut comes into the studio to introduce TruFit Scholarship winner Veronica Swain of Connecticut.  Veronica who lives in Fairfield and attends Southern Connecticut State University was recently awarded a $1,000 TruFit Scholarship from Citizens Bank for her volunteer work.

In the past two years, Veronica has facilitated a number of reproductive health education classes for Bridgeport teens and has also initiated a teen Peer Educator and Leadership Development Program. Why is this important? Bridgeport has the second highest rates of teenage births in CT. The Bridgeport rate is two times higher than the state and 30 percent higher than the country. The birth rate for Bridgeport teens was 33 births per 1,000 teenage girls. Bridgeport has the third highest rates of all STDs in CT, ranking in the top three highest prevalence areas of new HIV/AIDS infection in the state.

She also organized the collaborative project “Bridgeport Beautifies”- an initiative in urban beautification in the city of Bridgeport, CT, which received a citation from Mayor Bill Finch. She helped install two public murals, one community garden, and implemented a city-wide cleanup. More than 300 volunteers participated in mural-making and seed-planting workshops, as well as de-littered 21 neighborhoods on the cleanup day. 

The TruFit Student Loan is a private student loan available with a fixed or variable rate and flexible repayment terms, giving students the choice to select the option that best fits their needs. There are three repayment choices: immediate, interest-only or deferred until six months after graduation. Borrowers will receive an additional 0.50 percent interest rate reduction for automatic payments from any eligible Citizens Bank account or a 0.25 percent interest rate reduction for automatic payments from accounts at other banks. 

Citizens also offers online tips and tools to help students prepare and save for college as well as find information on how to apply for financial aid, federal and private college loans. The site includes a financing calendar with important dates and deadlines for securing funding and a student loan calculator to help students determine how much they will need to borrow to pay for college and how much they will owe once they graduate.

For more information on the TruFit Good Citizen Scholarship program and the TruFit Student Loan product, please visit http://www.citizensbank.com/trufitstudentloan .