When he headed in for a shift on March 13 at the Chick-fil-A in Algonquin, Illinois, Ryan Fist already knew it wouldn’t be just another day at work — he’d been told to expect a camera crew.

My boss told me, ‘Corporate is coming in to do a commercial, and we thought you’d be a good representative to be in it.’ And I thought, ‘OK, cool,’” said Mr. Fist, 22, who began working for the fast-food outlet when he was a sophomore in high school. “That was all I knew ahead of time.”

“The HPP was extremely helpful in deciding exactly the career path I wanted to take.”

An even bigger scenario unfolded when Andrew T. Cathy, CEO of Chick-fil-A, Inc., walked into the store with an oversized check, pledging $25,000 toward Mr. Fist’s education as one of 14 company employees across the United States and Canada receiving a True Inspiration Scholarship.

“I was shocked. It was an incredible moment,” Mr. Fist said, adding that he had previously applied for and received $1,000 for his education through the company’s Remarkable Futures program. “I was kind of expecting the same (amount). I never would have expected to receive this scholarship.”

Ryan Fist receives his scholarship from Chick-fil-A.

At the time of the big reveal, Mr. Fist was on spring break from Lake Forest College, weeks away from graduating with a degree in biology. As a participant in the Health Professions Program (HPP) — which prepares LFC students to pursue healthcare vocations at Rosalind Franklin University — he had been accepted into Â鶹ӰÒô’s Physician Assistant program.

“Ever since I was in high school, I knew I wanted to work in the medical field,” Mr. Fist said. “The HPP was extremely helpful in deciding exactly the career path I wanted to take. I wanted something where I was very directly working with patients, (and) from shadowing programs, I noticed that PAs were often the ones who get to spend the most one-on-one time with patients.”

Mr. Fist was looking forward to an all-expenses-paid trip to Atlanta to meet with his fellow scholarship winners and to coming to campus in May.

“I would love to be a pediatric PA,” he said.