If you could have something named after you, what would it be?
The Edith (Edie) and Gary Postiglione Scholarship in Environmental Engineering. It’s real, and creating it at the University of Minnesota was the last thing my husband of forty years and I did together before he died unexpectedly less than three weeks later… on November 1, 2022, his 75th birthday.
Having something named after me was never something I had wanted. It sounded so vain, so pretentious, so self-important… What I wanted was to do something with my life that made a difference, something to justify my existence and use of precious resources for decades.
We had planned to leave our life’s savings to various environmental and animal welfare charities, but when I realized that all the money in the world would not save the elephants in Africa if they could not get water, I wanted a smarter plan.
I was discouraged and discussing this with my therapist when she suggested an endowment for scholarships in Environmental Engineering. I thought her suggestion was brilliant, and my husband and I decided that night to do it. Two months later, it was done.
I hope the students who receive our scholarships will satisfy our real goal, which is to help save our planet, and that their names will be on awards for their wonderful discoveries and accomplishments.