Legacy: The Million Dollar Question

I look at my classmates, what rock stars they will be in the future and I ask them: "What do you want your legacy to be? 10 years from now, when you make heaps of money and your tax accountant suggests you need to make a million dollar contribution to a charity, where will you put your money? Would you want your name on a junior highschool? A cancer ward in a hospital? A park bench?"

I used to ask my friends at McMaster Engineering to remember McMaster in their donations (Mac Lab Endowment comes to mine) in a half joking attempt to "keep DeGroote out of McMaster" (Micheal DeGroote has been buying up parts of McMaster including the business school and life sciences department... We've been wondering when they'd rename the school DeGroote University).

Joking aside, the question is intended to provoke introspection. Most people will give to something they feel is a worthy cause or something which helped define them as a person. When presented with the prospect of where to make a significant contribution (the amount itself is trivial, whether people feel their ambition would be better accomplished with 10k or a billion dollars is not important - increasing the fictitious sum of money is an easy enough task) people think a little harder about what's important to them and you get some surprisingly personal answers. I'd also like to think that people learn a little bit more about themselves when confronted with the altruistic challenge.