St. Louis University High School reports they’ve “received the largest single-program donation in its 206 year history.” Sherry and Bob Conrads ‘65 committed $10 million to the school helping fuel the SLUH expansion of its STEM programming.
“The world has changed a lot,” said Bob Conrads. “I feel that there is an opportunity given the foundation that’s been built here to make a donation to enhance the curriculum and give you, the students, an opportunity to take advantage of a broader exposure to technology, which can help you as you advance your educational careers. The school needs resources to do that.”
Their donation sparks the creation of the Conrads Program for Integrated Sciences. They say it’s a “robust, forward-looking new STEM curriculum” focused on helping SLUH students to participate and be ready for technological innovation.
Previously, the school has accepted larger donations to the school as a whole. This donation was the largest ever given to one specific department or project.
The Conrads Program for Integrated Sciences gives SLUH students the opportunity to graduate with distinction in one of a few specific STEM concentrations. Eventually, SLUH says the program will integrate new courses and faculty resources.
This year’s implementation of the Computer-Aided Design course is considered a proactive step to expand STEM.
Director of STEM Education Dan See is eager to provide more for students. Their goal of adding the STEM program is to keep students up-to-date on technology, especially with artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computing.
“We want to be technologically advanced,” said See. “We don’t want to be lead from behind. We want to be at the front.”
Conrads also pointed to AI technology and the importance of staying ahead, “With the pervasiveness of AI and data science and computing, it’s going to become even more important in everybody’s lives – I think that the impact of technology in everybody’s life is going to accelerate dramatically in the next five to ten years, much more so than we’ve seen in the prior ten years.”
Vice President for Advancement, Sean Agniel, believes this will help further hone in on SLUH’s reputation for raising engineers. “I think we have an opportunity to train the next generation of innovators, of engineers, of thinkers in the sciences who have compassionate hearts and skilled pens,” said Agniel. “What makes this transformative is that it’s not only the largest gift to any particular program endeavor in the history of our school, but it’s also one that has a vision of balance and holistic education.”
Conrads has been around technology all his life. As a SLUH student he ran a business repairing TVs and radios with a hired employee. He graduated from Georgia Tech with a Master of Science in atomic physics and achieved a MBA from Harvard. He worked for an international consulting firm, McKinsey & Co., who had him working with top tech companies of the world. Conrads created a team at Toshiba that developed one of the first laptop computers. In 1994, he was announced CEO of Indigo America who eventually was bought by Hewlett-Packard.
Through all of this, Conrads credits SLUH as a big reason he’s been successful.
“The thing that SLUH offered up was a support system that gives you the opportunity to extend yourself, potentially fail, or have difficult times, but also a support system to help you make your way through that,” said Conrads. “That was really important for me here, because it gave me the conviction, the confidence when I went out into the world, to take risks and fail.”
/his donation comes after visiting the campus two years ago and two summers of sponsoring STEM faculty curriculum institutes. For several weeks the faculty collaborated how they’d use a large donation “to create a compelling vision of how STEM programming might be advanced.”
“He was very receptive and gave us a lot of freedom,” said See. “We have had a great working relationship with him.”
SLUH now has funds to push their STEM program to new heights and they’re very grateful to have such an esteemed alum backing them.
“We are very grateful to Bob and Sherry Conrads for their incredible generosity,” said President Alan Carruthers in an official statement. “Their transformational gift represents the largest donation to a specific program in SLUH history and will further distinguish our robust STEM program. It will also advance our Jesuit tradition of making a premier education accessible to young men from all walks of life, regardless of economic circumstances.”