A History of Paying it Forward
By Hannah Borland ’22 & Riley McGehee ‘22
The MSC Stark Northeast Tour has been impacting the lives of Texas A&M students for 50 years. Every year since 1970, 20 high-achieving students are given the opportunity to visit top law and business schools all over the northeast United States. The trip is named after former MSC Director, J. Wayne Stark, who impacted countless students during his time with the MSC. Many of those students have gone on to have successful careers and now give back to the MSC in honor of everything Stark gave to them.
One of these former students, Steve Horn, chooses to support the Northeast Trip through yearly gift-matching. As a student at Texas A&M, he was mentored by J. Wayne Stark and after graduation, earned an MBA from Harvard’s Business School. Horn went on to be one of the first Aggies to work as an investment banker on Wall Street, and says, “If I did not have the Harvard MBA credential, I would not have had a chance for that job.”
When asked why supporting the Stark Northeast Trip was important to him, Horn said, “Wayne was the person who encouraged me and many others to consider opportunities...we might not have considered otherwise.” Now, Horn encourages current students to pursue those same opportunities. Last year, he had the opportunity to visit with the students while they were in Boston and said, “It is a tremendous opportunity for [students] to see all these schools and understand graduate school and career choices better.”
The students of the 50th Stark Northeast Tour recently returned from their successful 10-day program. The Stark NE trip visited the University of Chicago, Northwestern, Harvard, MIT, Yale, Columbia, NYU and the University of Pennsylvania before returning to College Station.