UCI Student Wins Prestigious Truman Scholarship of $30,000 : Academia: The English and comparative literature scholar is school’s second award winner in 2 years.

IRVINE — Julia Kiely already met one challenge when she returned to college to get her bachelor’s degree more than a decade after graduating from a community college.

Now the 36-year-old UC Irvine undergraduate student has reached another milestone--a prestigious Truman scholarship.

Kiely, an English and comparative literature scholar, is the second UCI student in two years to win the $30,000 scholarship.

Kiely said she will use the scholarship to pursue a master’s degree in public policy and pay for her final undergraduate year at UCI.

“Politics is my life,” said Kiely, a staunch Republican whose father was president of his college’s Young Democrats club and whose mother headed her college’s Young Republicans group.

Kiely graduated from Cerritos College in 1979 and took night classes in the succeeding years while working, she said. Kiely joined the staff of a local congressman, later became the director of government affairs with the Anaheim Chamber of Commerce and also worked as an organizer for oil industry interests, she said.

She was one of the founders of CAST--or Child Abuse Service Team--a group coordinating city, county and state agencies to make services to abused children less traumatic.

In 1992, after she was unable to find a job in government or politics, Kiely decided to get a bachelor’s degree at UCI to compete in the job market.

Eventually, she said, she wants to serve as director or staff member of a foundation that supports and gives scholarships to abused children or youths at risk of falling into crime.

Kiely is pleased to have won the scholarship competing against younger students.

“I was much older” than the rest of them, Kiely said. “I could’ve been the mother of a couple of them.”