UConn has always been important to Tom and Eileen Marston.
Tom, a former student, volunteer and long-time basketball season ticket holder, has established a scholarship with his wife Eileen to support students on the Avery Point campus.
“UConn has been an important part of our lives for a long time,” says Tom ’74 (CLAS).
The Marstons recently extended their support of UConn even further by making a donation to Tom’s life insurance policy. They named the UConn Foundation as the beneficiary, which would receive half of the policy. This planned donation will allow them to further support their scholarship fund, the Tom and Eileen Marston Scholarship.
“We really wanted to support the scholarship,” explains Tom. “This way we were able to save a significant amount of money to keep the scholarship going in the long term.”
Since its inception in 2010, the scholarship has already provided financial support to 11 students on the Avery Point campus. Now it will support many more students in the years to come and leave a generous legacy.
“Creating a scholarship has been very rewarding,” says Tom. “We’ve even gotten to know some of the recipients over the years.”
Current recipient, Benjamin LeBlanc (senior year ’25) and coastal science student, says the scholarship has helped him ease some of the pressure of financially supporting his studies.
“The scholarship allowed me to focus more on my schoolwork without having to worry about paying tuition,” says LeBlanc. “I was able to do more on campus and focus on my studies because I was able to reduce the number of hours I had to work.”
Tom Marston did not attend the Avery Point campus, but his father, Thomas R. Marston ’71 (ED), did. His father’s class was the first to graduate from Avery Point, shortly after it opened in 1967. The Marstons decided to use their scholarship to support Avery Point students to honor him and to meet a need.
“When we first started looking for potential scholarships, we discovered that there were hundreds of scholarships of this type in Storrs, but only two in Avery Point,” says Tom.
Tom, who grew up in Clinton, studied biology at UConn and then earned a master’s degree in environmental science from the University of New Haven. He spent most of his career at Connecticut Water Co., where he rose to the position of vice president of business development.
He was able to leverage his experience with water utilities when he served on the advisory board of the university’s Institute of Water Resources. He was also part of a team of water utility employees who approached UConn to help operate their water system after an incident in 2005 when the university’s water withdrawals caused the Fenton River to dry up. The team worked with university officials to develop strategies and consider capital and ongoing maintenance needs to build a world-class water system.
Eileen is not a UConn graduate, but she supports the couple through her scholarship. She graduated from Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island, with majors in history and English. After college, she worked several administrative jobs and then turned to volunteer work, primarily raising service dogs for the Guiding Eyes for the Blind program.
“Puppies are a lot of work, but it was really rewarding,” Eileen says. “It was something we did together.”
The Marstons are now retired and live in Leland, North Carolina. They have two grown children and two grandchildren. Although they moved south, they still attend one or two UConn basketball games in the area each year.
