6.7.24

Planning ahead: Young alumna creates estate gift for future students

To say that Jessica Stitt ’08/09/22 has pride in her alma mater is to put it mildly. A third-generation Shocker, she has always considered giving back to the university a priority, largely because of the investment others made in her own life.

“As a student, I got to see these individuals who gave back and did so much for the community on such a large scale,” she recalls. “I thought to myself, ‘someday, I want to be able to do something like that.’”

Stitt has found many ways to give back to the university over the years, speaking to classes and at events and serving on the Alumni Advisory Board and the Shocker Pride Scholar selection committee. This year, she took her investment in WSU a step further, designating a planned gift of $100,000 to create a scholarship supporting study abroad opportunities for STEM students.

“I really wanted to ensure I had put a plan in place for what I knew I wanted to do,” said Stitt. While she hopes to be able to make the scholarship a reality while she is still alive, she didn’t want to leave it up to chance. “What I love about a planned gift is it puts it on paper. If you can spell it out now, then it’s not as hard down the road when you’re gone for your family to remember that this was a thing you would have loved to do.”

A recipient of the Wallace Scholarship, Stitt knows just how big a difference receiving financial assistance can make. She was a highly involved student, serving in leadership positions within her sorority and various engineering programs, and participating in the Puebla program and a semester studying abroad.

It was her time in Querétaro, Mexico, that inspired her to designate her scholarship for similar experiences. “I don’t think people realize how much overlap there is in the corporate world of things you learn in different colleges,” she said. With degrees in both industrial engineering and Spanish, Stitt has been able to create opportunities that wouldn’t have otherwise been available, like working as an expat for her company when she was five years into her career after college.

“I wasn’t afraid to do that job because of the opportunities I had in college,” she emphasizes. “And as someone with a STEM degree and a Spanish degree, I’ve found how much those complement each other in today’s global environment.”

Though she may never see the difference her gift will make in the lives of students in the future, Stitt says it’s like a ‘drop in the bucket’ moment, like the way a conversation you don’t remember having can have a huge impact on the person you’re having it with. “Your gift could be the difference between someone dropping out of college or finishing their degree – and you have no idea. That’s the beautiful thing about giving.”.