“It’s like being a member of an exclusive club,” says Halifax’s Benjamin Jain, who, like Charlotte, is a 2009 scholarship winner. “You meet people who are in the same boat and come from the same place. It was great to be able to talk about the Waeg (the Halifax sailing club) and someone would know right away what you mean. I truly felt at home around everyone.”

Better, he says, he got to meet some of the fourth year students at his first lobster dinner. Now, three years later, as he is about to graduate himself, “they’re all into their careers, but we’re still connected.” Scholarship alumni even have their own LinkedIn group.

“We even got together and organized our own thank-you for Don and Rob,” Charlotte says of the current group of oncampus Sobeys scholars. “We put together a video and got them some funny gifts… Commerce swag.”

While Queen’s officials handle the initial vetting of the scholarship applicants to make sure they meet the university’s admission requirements, a seven-member selection committee dominated by Sobey-appointed trustees— including both Donald and Rob—makes the final selections, whittling down the two dozen or so finalists to six winners and two alternates.

The Sobeys hands-on involvement helped them spot—and solve—one issue that threatened early on to undermine their larger goal of underwriting the winners’ full four-year university education. A number of otherwise very bright first-year students weren’t making the 80 per cent average they needed to maintain their scholarships. The main problem, Donald says, was the same one that dogged him back in the 1950s: weak math preparation in Atlantic Canada’s public schools. Students were stressing over their grades, Rob Sobey recalls, “so any enjoyment they should have gained from being at Queen’s went out the window.”

The Sobeys convinced Queen’s to lower the required average to 75 for first year only so the students could adjust. It worked. “After first year,” Donald says, “our students do better than the average student.”

“Every year,” he adds, the selection process “gets tougher. Ten years ago, the top candidates were easy to identify. Now, the competition is more intense, which is a good thing.”

Although marks are important— students must submit their high school transcripts, an essay and responses to a series of “canned questions”—the selectors are equally interested in what the scholarship guidelines describe as “proven leadership skills and involvement in school or community activities.”

“You may have a student with just an 88 in math,” says Rob, “but look, he was his high school president, he was the captain of his hockey team, he was working part time, he volunteered for three years at a soup kitchen… Instead of pure academics, which is what the university tends to look at, we’re able to look at the whole picture. We had some pushback [from Queen’s] at first,” he acknowledges, “but it’s all worked out.”

It has.

Sobeys scholars have more than done well academically.

Charlotte MacDonald, an Ontario University Athletics Academic All-Star, is the co-captain of Queen’s Varsity Figure Skating team. Benjamin Jain, who’s been on the Dean’s list every year, has been involved with marketing and promotions for the Queen’s Non-Profit Gateway, a Commerce department committee to pair business students with local nonprofits, and volunteers at Martha’s Table, a Kingston charity that provides low-cost meals to those in need.

Other Sobey alumni include Dartmouth native Robert Marsh, a 2007 graduate who was one of the finalists in the CBC’s “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” contest, and Cape Bretoner Kyle MacDonald, a 2010 graduate who was a defensive lineman on Queen’s 2009 Vanier Cup-winning football team.

Patricia Quek, one of the 2012 winners, fits right in with those overachievers.

At Fredericton High School, she participated in school musical string orchestras and chamber ensembles, was a competitive gymnast and coach, served as a coordinator for the Sogo Active Challenge and was a member and volunteer with both the Chinese Cultural Association of New Brunswick and also the Fredericton Community Kitchen.

Not to forget, she also won the prize for the highest mark in Accounting in her senior year.

It was that Grade 12 Accounting class, in fact, that changed the course of her academic career. Until then, she admits, “I was going into science.”