Leaving a Legacy of Philanthropy

Four years after its founding, the Data Science and AI Academy (DSA) has secured its first legacy endowment. The $100,000 planned gift will be unrestricted, giving the academy flexibility to address student needs and create new programming. What makes the gift truly special is the person who made it.

Barb Prillaman ’86 has been an engaged alumna for years, participating regularly in College of Sciences events and cross-campus functions. She serves on the College of Sciences Foundation Board of Directors and the college’s Alumni Advisory Board. She joined DSA in its second year as a lecturer, teaching a data communication course that she pitched and developed herself. 

“From our early days, [Prillaman] has been a core member of the DSA instructor community,” said Ray Levy, executive director of DSA. “Her student-centered, community-minded, active approach to teaching and learning represents core values of DSA. We are honored and delighted to receive our very first endowment from such an integral member of our team.”

Tapping Into Her Inner Teacher

Establishing an endowment for DSA was not part of Prillaman’s original estate plan. With four degrees from four different universities, she had decided to create two legacy endowments at each of her alma maters — one in her home department at each university and one benefiting each university’s libraries.

“These are places that have made me who I am,” said Prillaman. “I want to say thank you in an enduring way.” 

Prillaman’s involvement with DSA inspired her to create the additional endowment at NC State. She first learned of the academy at a College of Sciences Alumni Advisory Board meeting. 

“My ears perked up,” Prillaman said. “I got in touch with [Levy] and pitched an idea for a course in teaching students how to communicate their work in an accessible way.”  

She had no prior teaching experience when she joined DSA in 2022, enlisting the help of a teacher friend to develop the curriculum for her data communication course. During the process, she discovered she had more teaching skills than she thought.

“I realized that my ability to teach and explain comes from growing up with a sister who was neurodiverse,” Prillaman said. “Patti was two years older than me, but we learned together. Developmentally, I passed her at some point, but I was always there teaching and explaining things to her and never realizing that I was doing it.”

This awareness influenced Prillaman’s teaching approach. She reminds her students they already have science and communication skills — she’s merely showing them how to convey their work in plain language. 

Prillaman’s teaching journey at NC State, which began 40 years to the week after she took her first class at the university, has been a full-circle moment of learning unexpected things about herself. She came from high school as an artistically inclined student, never imagining she’d graduate with a STEM degree. Along the way, she developed a love of math and found that statistics allowed her to combine her creative side with her analytical side.  

“NC State provided me with the foundation for my career as a statistician,” Prillaman said. “The science, analytical and communication skills I learned here set me up for graduate school.”

As part of her original estate plan, she had already established endowments in the Department of Statistics and in the NC State University Libraries.

“I realized I had these other pieces covered, but one area that’s become very important to me was missing,” Prillaman said. “So it was a sense of symmetry and completion that inspired the DSA endowment.”

Supporting Those Who Support Students

All nine of Prillaman’s endowments were created with the intention of supporting the people who support students.

“Faculty and staff all work incredibly hard behind the scenes and don’t get nearly enough recognition,” Prillaman said. “These endowments give me an opportunity to publicly be a cheerleader for them. It’s ironic that as a lecturer, I’ve become one of them myself.”

She hopes that her legacy endowment will one day give DSA the means to hire more staff, teach more subjects and expand the curriculum. 

“The DSA staff does an amazing job with what they have, but I would like for them to have more,” Prillaman said. “I would like for them to be able to build bigger and realize some of the dreams they have.” 

This post was originally published in College of Sciences News.