Dan ’97 and Mariela ’97 Pietrzak both came to Lehigh as first-generation college students. They knew they would get a great education but were unaware of the added benefits they’d accrue: love, marriage, two children, a large group of lifelong friends, and the means to establish their own undergraduate scholarship program.
A Lehigh love story
Mariela, an accounting major, followed her brother, René Obregon ’96, to Lehigh. “I knew I wanted to study accounting and that Lehigh had a great program. And because my brother was there, I was able to see Lehigh from the social perspective, and I fell in love with the school,” she says.
Dan, also an accounting major, was attracted to both Lehigh’s academics and its golf program. “I also liked that Lehigh’s location in relation to where I grew up in southern New Jersey — not so close that you could go home to do laundry but not an airplane ride away, just a two-hour drive,” he says.
The Pietrzaks met their freshman year in core business classes and over the next four years became good friends, sharing the same social group and “spending endless hours studying in the library and in Rauch drinking coffee and Mountain Dew together,” Mariela says. Things got a bit more serious late senior year when they went on their first official date. Two years after graduation, they were engaged, then married a year later.
"We owe almost all our life together to Lehigh and the very generous donors who helped us.”
Paying back their good fortune
Both Dan and Mariela came to Lehigh because of scholarships. “I worked really hard in high school and was very grateful for the opportunity to attend Lehigh,” Mariela says. “I remember going to the scholarship dinners and meeting our donors, and thinking, ‘Wow, these people seem to genuinely care that I’m succeeding.’”
Their scholarships and those donors made a lasting impression on the Pietrzaks. “Even back when we were newly married, my thought was, ‘If we ever do well, we should pay this forward,’” Mariela recalls. “Because we owe almost all our life together to Lehigh and the very generous donors who helped us.”
Dan, a partner with global investment firm KKR, and Mariela, a volunteer with CASA, which serves immigrant families, recently established the Pietrzak Family Endowed Scholarship. They’ll be attending their first scholarship dinner as donors this spring.
“Scholarships like the one we created allowed me to attend Lehigh,” Dan says. “Giving back this way is something Mariela and I have always had on our radar — Lehigh has been such a great school for us and an important part of our lives.”
Dan also gives back as a founding member of Lehigh’s Finance Mentorship Program, mentoring young Lehigh alumni in their mid-careers to help them land Wall Street jobs. “The alumni we work with also mentor undergraduate students. It’s been a great way for them to pay it forward and allows students to hit the ground running in finance when they graduate,” he says.
The magic of Lehigh
Besides their education and marriage, another benefit of their time at Lehigh has been the Pietrzaks’ large group of lifelong friends. They had a reunion in Long Beach Island, New Jersey, with those friends this past summer. “Between Dan’s fraternity and some of my girlfriends and everyone’s kids, there were 60 of us,” Mariela says. “For me, there was just this magic about Lehigh that attracted like-minded people — it made my four years there amazing.”