Campus Experience Leads to Scholarship

Like many of her fellow Iowa State University alumni, Donna Johnson Fuller has elected to establish a scholarship on campus. She hopes to help current students in a way that was unavailable while she was a student.

In Donna’s case that assistance has taken on a whole new meaning because she was one of a kind during her stint as an undergraduate in the 1960s.

“I think there was another female in marketing but that was it,” said Donna (’68 accounting). “But I was the only woman accounting major.”

“It was a little rough at the beginning, but I had a natural aptitude for accounting and business. I guess the men considered me an oddball and weren’t real nice to me for a year or so. But it didn’t take long for them to realize I could help them instead.”

During her undergraduate years, Donna also worked the swing shift at a local electronics factory. While she says these experiences made her a better person, she has decided to do her part to make sure others don’t have to take the same path.

She has since established the Donna Fuller Scholarship. The scholarship is awarded to women accounting majors.

“Even though we probably don’t need to encourage more women to become accountants, I think it’s still a good thing to do,” Donna said.

But Donna hasn’t stopped with just a scholarship. After a successful professional career in the San Francisco area as a certified public accountant, she wanted to give more back to her university.

So she created an endowed faculty position in Iowa State’s College of Business because of her experiences on campus.

“Like many Iowa State graduates, I’m from a working-class family from small-town Iowa,” she said. “I feel fortunate how my life has turned out, and I owe a lot of that to the time I spent at Iowa State and the education I received.”

When she first arrived on campus, Donna said she was shy and not very outgoing. But her experiences as the only female accounting major on campus changed that personality to a self-described “aggressive broad.”

“I had to fight for what I wanted while I was a student. That changed my whole personality,” she said. “If I wouldn’t have changed at Iowa State and moved to California, I wouldn’t have had the life I have now.”