To my mysterious benefactors
I got a full ride to Stanford thanks to the Elsie B. Ballantyne fund. I never met the Ballantyne family, but I am eternally grateful for their support. This is my thank you letter.
The Elsie B. Ballantyne foundation was formed in 1968 and it dissolved in 1972. This is all I could find about them online. Yet a gift they made to Stanford paid my way through college. I was told that Mr. Robert Ballantyne was elderly and had trouble seeing, so I regularly wrote him thank-you notes in large letters informing him of my progress. When he passed away, I decided to write to his wife to send my condolences. Below is a verbatim copy of that letter.
I never heard back from my mysterious benefactors, but they showed me the value and the joy of giving. Our foundation KANTAROT is a way of paying their gift forward.
Dear Mrs. Ballantyne,
My name is Nikola Stikov and I am an international student from Macedonia studying at Stanford. It is the first time I am writing to you, but in the past I sent two letters to your husband, Mr. Robert Ballantyne, expressing my gratitude for the scholarship your family has granted me. I just found out that Mr. Ballantyne passed away, so I decided to write to you and give you my condolences.
I am not sure if you have read my past two letters, so in the hope of establishing a regular correspondence with the Ballantyne family, I will tell you a little bit about my background and what the Elsie B. Ballantyne Undergraduate Scholarship Fund has done for me.
As I mentioned earlier, I am an international student coming from a poor and undeveloped country. Macedonia is still recovering from the Balkan wars and many young people there are left without perspective and want to leave the country. I felt the same way after finishing high school, and I really wanted to study abroad. However, if it wasn’t for the Ballantyne Fund, I could not have afforded my studies at Stanford.
Right now, I am a senior graduating in Electrical Engineering and I am using the last portion of my Ballantyne scholarship. As my undergraduate education comes to an end, I wanted to reflect on my four years here and express my deepest gratitude to your family for making my Stanford experience possible. Thanks to you, I was not only able to complete a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, but also take part in many activities that made my education complete. I became a teaching assistant for the Computer Science Department and discovered my desire to teach and pursue an academic career. I spent a quarter studying in Berlin and got a chance to see Europe (I had never been to another European country before). Stanford has opened many doors for me, and it has helped me make an informed decision about my future. I am staying in Stanford to complete my graduate degree and I am hoping to become a professor of Electrical Engineering.
However, Stanford also made me realize what my home country means to me. I would like to go back to Macedonia and use my education to improve things there. Right now, whoever gets a chance to leave Macedonia does so, and having once left, rarely comes back. I would like to be one of the few to return to Macedonia and help the country get out of the mud it is in. I hope that with a PhD from a renowned educational institution I could do a lot for the Macedonian educational system and stop the outflow of young people from the country. Only then will it be possible to bring Macedonia closer to Europe politically and economically.
As I close this letter, I would like to once again express mine and my parents’ deepest gratitude to you and your family for making my Stanford education possible. I sincerely hope that you will get back to me and that I will get a chance to get to know you better. I am deeply indebted to the Ballantyne family and it would be a pleasure and honor to hear back from you.
Thank you,
Nikola Stikov
2024 P.S. I did become a professor of electrical engineering and I am helping my country get out of the mud. Some promises are hard to break.