WTAMU set a goal and reached it. For the past five years, the top of the WTAMU website home page has had a graph representing the money that has been raised. West Texas, its students, community and alumni have finally reached their goal of $35 million. Brittany Castillo, a WT student and Lead WT member, who went to the press conference on Monday, January 27 announcing the completion of Share Your Pride fundraiser, said WT has exceeded their goal and is raising the bar to raise more money for scholarships.
The university is now pushing to add another five million dollars for scholarships by August.
“It’s very exciting for our university to make this mark on our timeline, WT is in its prime and it a great time to be a Buff,” Leif Knippers, student body president, said.
The next step in going forward is to keep thanking the donors and keeping up the relationships between the school, the donors and alumni while building on the relationship with the new alumni.
As for the future campaign students and community members are welcome to submit ideas and request for their department and for the college itself. While some have donated money within the community others have made their contributions by donating horses to the horse center. The center sits on 80- acres, home to the women’s competitive equestrian team, and houses a herd of 50 horses for WTAMU students.
The community leaders also provide money for a stock student management program, where students were given an initial value of $100,000, which grew to the exceeding amount of $650,000 in 2012. The stock holdings received a 4.3 percent return compared to the year before.
“WTAMU does a great job in supporting the students,” Knippers said.
From 2001 to 2012 the program has received $99,500 in scholarship money for business students. Finance majors investigate one or more investment opportunities, which are then sent to the student portfolio managers for consideration. The students get to learn investment fundamentals, valuation techniques and technical analysis all of which allow the students to buy and sell stocks with the long-term goal of providing students with scholarships.
Carley du Menil the Senior Development Officer in the College of Business and current grad student says the outcome in August is going to be very successful.
“I feel very fortunate to have worked on the campaign as a student and as a faculty member,” du Menil said.
The future campaign will focus on scholarships as well as the students, but also on renovations that were not started and will be talked about next campaign.
