When she began casting about for where she should go to pursue her newfound business interests, she discovered that a student from the previous year’s graduating class had attended Queen’s on a Sobey scholarship. Better, she had a good friend who was already in third year at Queen’s.

Now three months into her own BComm studies, Patricia says, “Queen’s has surpassed my expectations.” So has the scholarship. The Sobeys even “reached out to me” during a reception for the incoming students last summer. “Rob and Don have been great,” she says. “It’s felt like family.”

If there is one caveat to the scholarship’s obvious success, it is simply that many of its graduates—Atlantic Canada’s best and brightest—are too good. They’re being wooed away to the bright lights and greater opportunities on Bay Street and Wall Street rather than returning to the east coast where their skills are sorely needed.

When she graduates this spring, for example, Charlotte MacDonald will head off to Toronto and a job with Boston Consulting. Benjamin Jain is test driving law schools in Ontario and the United States. He wants to study corporate law, he says, because it “combines all the things I’m interested in.”

Neither Charlotte nor Ben are contemplating a return to Atlantic Canada any time soon. “For now,” explains Ben, “I want to see a bit more of the world, and live and work in some place new.”

Though she’s only in her first year, Patricia Quek feels much the same way. “I’m staying in Ontario for now,” she says. “It’s more competitive, and there are a lot of bright minds to challenge you to do better.”

“Some people might say we are a bit too forceful when we tell the first years there are no strings attached to their scholarship,” Rob Sobey acknowledges. “They can go wherever, do whatever.” It’s also easy enough to see why large corporations and international investment bankers are so eager to recruit them to strut their stuff on a larger stage, he says. “They’re very bright young people.”

“The hope,” he adds, “is that eventually some of them will find their way back to Atlantic Canada.”

Some already have.

When he graduated from Queen’s in 2004, scholarship winner Truman Mailman traded in his new BComm for a job as a management trainee in Sobeys downtown Toronto store. He worked the grocery night shift “in the first heat wave in Toronto” and, later, spent time in the meat department “cutting meat and tying up roasts. Rob and Don have always been strong believers that you should start at the back of the store. There are things you can’t learn in a text book.”

Having learned, he worked his way quickly up the management ranks to downtown Toronto store manager, then category manager at Sobeys Ontario head office and then, finally… last spring, a job as National Category Manager for over-thecounter drugs for both Sobeys pharmacies and Sobey-owned Lawtons Drugs. That job, based in Lawtons head office in Dartmouth, finally brought him home.

“That was always the goal,” he says. “I enjoyed my eight years in Toronto but my wife—she’s from here too—knew we wanted to come home at some point. We’re real proud Atlantic Canadians.”

The next round of scholarship winners will be announced in the spring.