Patrick Bedard GR’19 is a vice president and director of administration for First Bank of the Lake, a Missouri-chartered commercial lender with offices in Hanover, New Hampshire. He received a masters of arts in liberal studies degree from the Guarini School of Graduate and Advanced Studies in 2019. Patrick joined the Bartlett Tower Society in 2025 by making Dartmouth a beneficiary of his IRA.
I received my master’s degree through the Guarini School. I studied public policy as an undergraduate, then did the MALS program part-time. I chose the Globalization track: the program is structured a bit like a liberal arts degree—a mix of concentration courses, interdisciplinary courses, and electives, plus a thesis. The flexible nature of the program means that you can study something you love. For me, this meant the intersection of British constitutional law, the monarchy, and Brexit.
One of the real highlights of the program was the people I met. There’s an intergenerational quality to MALS that I found genuinely enriching—fellow Dartmouth employees who felt drawn towards lifelong learning, retirees (including Dartmouth alums) coming back to study something they’d always wanted to learn more about, teachers using their summer breaks to pursue a part-time master’s, service members using the GI Bill, and even aspiring academics looking to test the waters before diving into a PhD. I loved meeting passionate individuals from different backgrounds—people whom I wouldn’t have otherwise overlapped with in life.
You’re making an impactful gift that you don’t have to part with right now
I joined the Bartlett Tower Society because planned giving felt like such an easy yet meaningful way for me to engage with philanthropy at Dartmouth as a young person. You’re making an impactful gift that you don’t have to part with right away. You get the satisfaction of supporting an institution you care about and you have decades to grow that gift into something even more meaningful.
I directed my gift to the Guarini School. My designation was $10,000, which, from a retirement planning perspective, is a relatively small percentage. But it’s nice to feel like I’m making a real commitment at a time in life when a current-use gift of $10,000 would be much more of a stretch—that’s valuable to me and to Dartmouth. There’s something a little bit selfish about how it works: I get the happiness and satisfaction now of making a material gift to a place I love, and, when the gift is ultimately realized, I won’t be looking to take it with me.
Planned giving is a great option for anyone with a retirement account, regardless of where they are financially. Almost everyone has some kind of retirement plan—401ks, IRAs, pensions, life insurance policies. This kind of giving is a way to engage philanthropically with institutions like Dartmouth no matter where you are in life. And one of the best parts is, because that $10,000 was allocated as a percentage of a retirement account, the gift – and its impact – will keep growing over time. In today’s economic and political environment, the cost of delivering a Dartmouth-quality education is growing fast, and I like to think that my gift is working hard in the background to keep up.