Helping Throughout the College
Many gifts made during the Forever True, For Iowa State campaign to the College of Veterinary Medicine created individual scholarships, named faculty positions, assisted in facility projects or purchased much-needed equipment in the Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center.
These gifts were designated for a specific purpose.
But countless other gifts were undesignated and have proven just as valuable for the college to achieve its goals.
“Undesignated gifts during the campaign have allowed the college to specifically target priorities,” said Dr. Dan Grooms, the Dr. Stephen G. Juelsgaard Dean of Veterinary Medicine.
Undesignated funding, whether it is a $100 gift or a $10,000 donation, has been pooled together to meet a variety of college priorities. None are as important as scholarships for DVM students.
Grooms said new scholarships were created to help recruit top students from throughout the world to come to Iowa State to study veterinary medicine.
“The debt load our students has is an increasingly troubling issue for Iowa State and veterinary colleges across the country,” Grooms said. “We were able to increase not only the number of scholarships we could offer, but the size of the scholarships as well.”
The new scholarships were used not only to attract the best and the brightest to Iowa State, but also to change the diversity of the student body. The Frederick Douglass Patterson Diversity and Inclusion Scholarship was created through undesignated gifts made to the college and has provided much-needed financial support to its recipients.
Each academic department in the college has also benefitted from undesignated gifts through faculty retention packages, teaching support, laboratory renovations, and support for the Junior Surgery program. Significant undesignated funds have come from Linda and Gene Lloyd, who have provided funding for the renovation of the Fish Tank Lobby, updating the conferencing abilities and wireless displays in the Lloyd Veterinary Medical Center’s rounds rooms, creating a diversity recruitment program for house officers, creating two Dean’s Fellowships, and funding the concurrent DVM/PhD program.
“Undesignated gifts are extremely useful because the college’s needs change over time,” Grooms said.