UPDATE: Please pass the word on to anyone you know who might consider voting for Kim. Voting is open through October 28 and the more votes, the better! Just know that if you’re in a dorm or household with the same IP address, you may be blocked since the site only allows one entry per IP address.

As some of you know, the original Law School Mom is raising her son, taking a full load of law school classes, and battling breast cancer! Right now there is a $10,000 full time student blogger scholarship competition going on and Kim has been nominated. Her blog now focuses on her cancer fight, but her original blog on motherhood and law school was a real inspiration to me as I was going through the application process this time last year. Please visit her blog and vote for Kimberly Klein HERE. Let’s help take the rising medical bills off her already too-full plate!

Here’s the text of Kim’s post on why the scholarship would help her:

I haven’t written much about the financial aspect of cancer, but as you can imagine it plays a very big role in all of this. We are very lucky that we have private health insurance that so far has covered a large portion of my medical expenses. And the costs are astronomical. Insurance hasn’t covered it all, however, and we have had to make major adjustments in our spending and budgeting in order to keep our heads above water. We have dipped into and used most of our cash savings and have had to resort to other sources of funds such as college and retirement savings in order to make this work. People don’t talk about this part of it very much because as a society we don’t talk about money, but it has caused me a very high level of stress throughout the entire ordeal. I can’t even imagine how people who do not have insurance deal financially with a cancer diagnosis and treatment.

I am going to law school to fulfill a dream, but there are practical reasons for my choice, as well. We always knew that in order to send three kids to college and to be able to eat when we retire I was going to have to return to work at some point. Right now I am on track to graduate from law school the same month that Karly graduates from high school. That means that in 2009 our mailbox will contain both my new paychecks and new tuition bills. Perfect timing. In addition, I will have to begin making payments on my student loans, which will be in the range of $80,000-$100,000.

Not long ago I stumbled upon a link to a website that was offering a $10,000 Blogging Scholarship to a post-secondary education student blogger. Since I fit the application profile I thought I would go ahead and submit my blog just to see what happened. What happened was that my blog was nominated as one of 20 finalists for the $10,000 scholarship. Needless to say, this scholarship would be an immense help to my family and to me right now.

While I am amazed and ecstatic that writing these posts for you has garnered such a nomination for me, I can’t win it without your help. Twenty blogs have been nominated, but it’s up to the voting public to choose the winner. That’s right…$10,000 will be awarded to a winner chosen by the internets. It’s kind of like American Idol but instead it’s Blogger Idol.

So I am asking for your help and for your vote. Voting is open from now through midnight on October 28, 2007. In order to vote, you can click on this link. On the webpage that comes up you will see a list of 20 names with radio button next to them. My name is 7th on the list and you can see that I have some serious competition. Will you vote for me, and will you ask your friends to vote for me, too? Thank you.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 1:30 pm and is filed under Health, Law School, Mommy stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.