Mentor Bob Goldstein gets coffee with mentee and Carolina Covenant scholar TK Pham (Photo by Jeyhoun Allebaugh/UNC-Chapel Hill).
For TK Pham ’26, the Carolina Covenant offered more than financial support. It helped her find community, including a special relationship with her faculty mentor.
When TK Pham ’26 reflects on her four years at Carolina, there is one word she uses to describe her experiences: “community.”
“I really value community, so I’ve been involved in lots of organizations,” she said. “I volunteer at the community garden, and I love meeting new people there and working with them. I also work with Get Covered Carolina to help people figure out health insurance and get access to health care.”
A health policy and management major, Pham described a feeling of connection that she shared with students and faculty in the major. “We’re a true cohort,” she said. “Having those close relationships with my professors and my peers makes me feel at home and has been really special.”
Another source of community has been the Carolina Covenant, the groundbreaking scholar program designed to recruit and retain talented admitted students from low-income families through a debt-free financial aid package and robust system of support. Pham came to UNC-Chapel Hill from Fayetteville, North Carolina, with support from the Covenant. As a first-generation student, she expected the challenges of college life to push her out of her comfort zone.
“It was something I was used to with the college application process,” Pham said. “There was so much I had to Google just to figure out how to fill out FAFSA. I was really by myself, but I just had to do it.”
When she arrived on campus, she realized that she could benefit from the Covenant’s mentorship program, which pairs Covenant scholars with faculty members and is one of several ways the Covenant helps students find a network of support. As Pham looked at the list of potential mentors, biology professor Bob Goldstein seemed like the perfect fit.
“I thought, ‘Wow, here’s this opportunity to connect with someone that can help me along the way,” Pham said. “I saw that that there was one mentor who aligned with my interest in science, but also I saw that he liked art and had a fun personal side, so it felt like he would be cool to talk to outside of academics. Honestly, building a connection with him wasn’t that difficult at all. I feel like we clicked on the first meeting and it’s just like, oh yeah, I want him to be my mentor once I met him that first time.”
The relationship that developed over the following years was centered on their shared interests, including a love of coffee. “I think we have visited every coffee shop in Chapel Hill and Carrboro together over the last four years,” Goldstein said.
The coffee meetups, held roughly once a month, covered topics well beyond academics. Pham, who is applying to graduate school programs with the ultimate goal of going to medical school, said the consistent and casual conversations were the perfect outlet.
“Bob has just been very reassuring and encouraging,” Pham said. “He’s always there to share his viewpoints, give me advice on how I can just be an adult living through life, especially in the moment that we live in. I’m just really grateful to have just a constant support nearby because I feel like for sure my experience at Carolina would’ve been totally different being by myself.”
Goldstein has mentored several Covenant Scholars through the years and is a recipient of the Clark & Kessler Award for Excellence in Mentoring, which is given to mentors who go above and beyond in demonstrating the highest characteristics of strong mentoring relationships. He says his approach is to start by letting students know that he’s “on their team.”
“When we met, I told her I’m on ‘Team TK’ for all four years,” he said. “I’m here to celebrate her success so she should never feel like she’s showing off when she tells me something great. And likewise, if she hit obstacles, I’m here to try to help if I can with that or even just to lend an ear.”
From Goldstein’s perspective, he has seen Pham apply her work ethic and ambition through a challenging academic track while retaining positivity.
“She’s just about maxed out the number of credit hours she can take,” he said. “If I were working as hard as she must be, I might come across as more stressed, but she has a spark and is just voracious to learn more, especially if it’s learning about things that will help other people.”
When Goldstein received the University’s Edward Kidder Graham Faculty Service Award in 2025, Pham spoke at the ceremony. “She said she was really proud of me, which was an incredibly meaningful moment to have the mentorship flipped like that,” Goldstein said. “I tear up just talking about it, and I’m obviously very proud of her, too. It was the perfect thing for her to say because working with students like TK, I feel like I gain as much as I give.”
Story by Drew Guiteras
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