“They”They can never take this away from you,” whispered former Penn State faculty member Steve Sawyer to C. Frank Igwé as the two men hugged and shook hands. It’s a moment still vivid in Frank Igwé’s memory: Sawyer was a member of his dissertation committee, along with Russell Barton, Lynette Kvasny Yarger, and Andrea Tapia; the year was 2008, and Igwé had just defended his dissertation and earned his doctorate from the College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST). It was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream for Igwé—and it nearly didn’t happen.
“IST saved me,” recalls Igwé today. He had started in a different graduate program, but he didn’t find his true home at Penn State until he landed in the University’s youngest college at the time, just five years after it was founded in 1999. “I had been in academic settings where there weren’t many people who looked like me, but coming to IST was a whole new world. My faculty committee was Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, straight, gay. I was able to get comfortable and really learn what they taught me—how to think, how to break down a problem and solve it, how to be a scientist and a researcher.”
Igwé went on to use those skills as an entrepreneur, founding one of the state’s largest home health agencies, Moravia Health. He went on to earn other degrees, too, including an M.B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and become a Fellow at Harvard University. Igwé has never lost his gratitude to IST, though, and this year, he made a commitment to help other alumni and future students. His gift to establish the Igwé Family Matching Scholarship Program is providing up to a total of $250,000 in matching support for gifts from first-time scholarship donors, allowing them to parlay a minimum $25,000 commitment into double the impact for students who contribute to the diversity of the student body, first-generation college students, and students with financial need.
“This is a down payment. I don’t think that I will ever really be able to repay IST for what it’s done for me, but this is a start.”
C. Frank Igwé hopes that his scholarship and his story will inspire future IST donors and students.
“This is a down payment,” says Igwé. “I don’t think that I will ever really be able to repay IST for what it’s done for me, but this is a start.”
The Igwé Family Matching Scholarship Program follows a model established by the IST Dean’s Advisory Board last year. The group realized that as a relatively new college, IST couldn’t turn to generations of alumni to support scholarships for current and future students; the first graduates only earned their degrees in the early 2000s. By pooling their contributions to create a matching fund, the advisory board hoped to ease the path to philanthropy for alumni still in the early decades of their professional lives, like Angela Liberto and Josh Rex.
“Penn State prepared us well for career success,” says Liberto, a 2004 IST graduate who also holds a J.D. from Duquesne University School of Law and now serves as vice president and associate general counsel at Dick’s Sporting Goods. “I still draw on what I learned throughout my experience at Penn State when I work with our teams to solve problems, tap into project management skills, and draw from my technical background to think broadly about how to improve processes.”
Hanna Olivares is the first recipient of the Liberto Rex Dean’s Advisory Board Matching Scholarship.
Liberto met her husband and fellow IST alum, Josh Rex, when they were both working at consulting firm CGI. A 2005 graduate, Rex earned an MBA from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business in 2012, and he is now a customer adoption strategist at Workday. Now with two young children, the couple is at a stage of life when few donors make major gifts. Last year, however, with the help of the IST Dean’s Advisory Board Matching Scholarship Program, they established the Liberto Rex Dean’s Advisory Board Matching Scholarship. Senior cybersecurity analytics and operations major Hanna Olivares is the first recipient.
“As a first-generation college student, I’m excited to be a role model to my extended family,” says Olivares, who moved to Philadelphia from Mexico at the age of 9. She has taken on leadership roles in many IST organizations since transitioning from Penn State Abington to University Park. “Financial aid has been a big concern for me, and this scholarship has given me the flexibility to focus on my academics and co-curricular activities and not worry about the cost of being here. IST is such a welcoming community, and the opportunities are endless.”
To date, thirteen scholarships have been created through the IST Dean’s Advisory Board Matching Scholarship Program, and three have been established with matching funds from Dr. C. Frank Igwé. He hopes that his support will inspire both donors like Liberto and Rex and students like Olivares. “Matching funds are about building momentum, helping people to see that their gifts can have more impact,” he says. “And I want students to see me, to see someone who looks like them, and think, ‘If he could earn an IST degree and succeed and give back, then I can do it, too.’”