Our Story

This scholarship fund is in memory of Rachael Schopp, honoring her legacy and ambition in the health sciences and music worlds. Rachael Sydney Schopp died on June 2, 2020, in Chicago, IL, following a 2017 car accident from which she never woke up. She was a young woman full of life and love — a bright spark of a soul who briefly illuminated this world with her voice, laughter, and beautiful spirit.

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Music played an integral role in Rachael's life. As a young girl, she took tap and ballet, and soon learned to play the piano. But once she started singing, she never looked back. In elementary school, she sang in the children’s choir at St. John of the Cross parish church and participated in school musicals; in high school, she sang in the Fenwick Madrigal’s Choir and with Bravura of the Spirito Singers. Clear-eyed and determined, Rachael always knew what she wanted, and was wholly committed to accomplishing it. That included her career: She’d known she wanted to be a doctor since second grade. Every summer during her middle school years, she attended camp at a local hospital, where she reveled in learning anatomy and dissecting cow livers. And when she graduated from Fenwick High School in 2014, she enrolled at St. Louis University to study health sciences in the pre-medicine program.

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Rachael will always be remembered as strong, generous, caring, patient, and fun-loving; a ray of sunshine who lit up each room she entered. As someone who appreciated every little thing about this life — the people, the music, the oceans and the sky — and who experienced far more joy than one would expect of her 24 short years.