Arkin donated $2m to the school to create the Suzanne Salter Arkin Science Endowment. The goal of this is to fund external and internal research activities conducted by undergraduate students. The endowment's main program will give students stipends to participate in externships over the summer, provided that the students participating in the externships have started their research on campus.
Schools can use catalog printing to highlight new sources of funding and to attract new students to their programs. Kanwal Singh, the dean of Sarah Lawrence, described the donation as being "transformational” and added:
“While the college is well known for the arts and humanities, our pedagogy, which gives students research experience from day one, is also particularly well suited for the sciences."
With the funding, the hope is that students will be able to engage in more in-depth, on campus research and that they will take their work out into the world, to companies, hospitals, and other research organizations throughout New York.
The donation does not just provide opportunities for the students of Sarah Lawrence; the hope is that the endowment will make the college more competitive with other liberal arts colleges that are known for concentrating on the sciences.