Regina Torsney-Durkin Shares Her Reason for Support DeSales Students Through Scholarships
On Sunday, March 29th, donor and long-time supporter Regina Torsney-Durkin shared the story behind her passion for DeSales at the annual Spring Scholarship Lunch. At the event, University donors with named and endowed scholarships were invited to Palm Sunday Mass followed by lunch with DeSales students who receive those scholarships. This special gathering provides an opportunity for donors to connect directly with students, and for students to express their gratitude.
Regina Torsney-Durkin served as one of this year’s speakers and shared the reasons for recently establishing the Thomas J. Durkin, Jr. M.D. Endowed Scholarship Fund in memory of its namesake, her late husband who passed away in 2001.
Tom was the oldest of seven children and did not have many options for college, coming from such a large family without the means to address the cost for schooling. Tom’s father suggested he look into DeSales University (then Allentown College) because he was familiar with several of the Oblates of St. Francis de Sales who were instrumental in its founding. This became a beacon of hope for Tom when they offered significant scholarship support to complete his education. He graduated in the class of 1973 with a major in biology, and then went on to Georgetown Medical School, which is where he and Regina first met.
The couple married the day after graduating from medical school and each went on to pursue their own careers in medicine in Philadelphia – Tom as a pediatrician, Regina as a neurologist. Through all of it, they remained passionately involved with their respective alma maters, and invested their resources in supporting and fostering students who were doing everything they could to gain an education and start their careers – just like Tom and Regina had done so many years before them.
After Tom passed away, Regina used the funds he had set up to provide college funding for their 29 nieces and nephews. With most of them grown and graduated, she was inspired to begin a scholarship fund in his name for a student studying in the College of Sciences, to honor the wonderful opportunities DeSales afforded him, and to continue the work to which he dedicated his life. Regina shared that the students she encounters here at DeSales personify the values she and Tom carried through their careers; hard work, humility, and gratitude, among so many others. She holds it as such a blessing to be able to support students through the same kind of scholarships that made their work, and their lives, a possibility.