By Lincoln DePradine
Chukwudera Chukelu, a Centennial Faculty scholar, is grateful to be a scholarship winner.
The faculty, on Tuesday, hosted its 2025 “Pupil Awards’ Night time’’ for the Faculty of English and Liberal Research, Centre for On-line Studying & Microcredentials, The Enterprise Faculty, & Faculty of Communications, Media, Arts and Design.

Chukelu was offered with the Eric R. Wickham Memorial Scholarship.
“It’s an unimaginable honour to obtain the Eric R. Wickham Memorial Scholarship. Being acknowledged within the identify of somebody who devoted his life to training and uplifting the Black group is profoundly significant to me,’’ Chukelu stated.
Wickham, a Barbadian-Canadian after whom the scholarship is called, was a revered group elder {and professional} accountant, who was employed as a enterprise teacher at Centennial Faculty, from 1979 to 2004.
At Centennial, Wickham additionally developed a groundbreaking basic training faculty course titled, “Historic Africa: Superb Legacies’’, which offered an in-depth self-study of African kingdoms and Egyptian antiquity.
He died November 10, 2023, at Centenary Hospital in Scarborough. He was 83.
The inaugural Eric R. Wickham Memorial Scholarship was offered final yr on his birthday, March 26, on the Pupil Awards’ Night time that was attended by surviving relations together with spouse Emily, daughter Aisha, and son Olembe.
“We think about a group of alumni making an affect within the enterprise world and giving again to the Black group, identical to Dad did,” Olembe Wickham commented on the institution and presentation of the primary scholarship.
“His expectations of scholars have been very excessive; he acquired quite a lot of satisfaction out of seeing an underperforming scholar do properly by the top of his programs.’’
This yr’s scholarship presentation to Chukelu—a scholar in Centennial’s Enterprise Analytics and Insights Graduate Program—“went very properly’’, stated Aisha Wickham. “It was good to be there once more and meet the second recipient.’’
The scholarship award, in accordance with Chukelu, has “fueled’’ his “ardour to guide, serve, and signify simply as Mr. Wickham did. I sincerely thank the Wickham household for his or her generosity’’, he added. “It evokes me to maintain striving ahead in my journey as an expert and group builder, and sooner or later, to turn out to be somebody others look as much as simply as we proceed to look as much as Mr Wickham and his lasting legacy.’’
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