Bequest to Fund Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity in Perpetuity
More than 100 Allegheny students across the academic spectrum spent this summer on campus engaged in mentored research or creative activity (arts and humanities) with faculty and staff. Three or four presented their work each week to a full house over a luncheon open to the campus. Donor support ensured that, as with paid summer internships, students received funding for the experience and did not have to forgo it in order to take summer jobs.
Dr. John Orchard ’66 would have jumped at the prospect himself as a student were it available. Instead, he established the John L. ’66 and Mindy Orchard Fund for Undergraduate Research to support today’s students, especially outside of the academic year. Many use the experience to inform their “senior comps,” make conference presentations, and co-author articles with their mentors.
John and his late wife met when he was a resident at Mercy Hospital (now part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center). They spent a decade in South Carolina as John served on the faculty of the USC School of Medicine and as chief of gastroenterology at the VA Columbia Health System. The Orchards returned to Pittsburgh for another ten years, where John was the director of research at Mercy and a practicing physician. They then settled in Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, where John joined a former trainee as a partner in private practice in Georgetown for 25 years before retiring.
Mindy was a teacher and supervised student teachers. The couple was interested in the intersection of the arts and humanities with science and were taken with the College’s interdisciplinary curriculum. Following Mindy’s death in 2023, John chose Allegheny’s heralded undergraduate research program as the locus of their support.
John endowed their fund to ensure that these research opportunities will last in perpetuity. He has also made a bequest provision through his estate that will one day provide a substantial increase to the amount of annual support available for students. In starting the fund now, with his largest gift to come at his passing, John experiences the delight of giving and meeting the students he and others support at the Richard J. Cook–Teresa M. Lahti Scholars Symposium held on campus each spring.
© Pentera, Inc. Planned giving content. All rights reserved.
Disclaimer
