A new scholarship has become available to students majoring in economics and business economics, established by Youngstown State University affluent alumnus Joseph Carson.
Dubbed the Joseph G. Carson Internship Scholarship, the scholarship is granted to students, with the aforementioned majors, pursuing internships in their fields. Preference is given first to internships out of the Youngstown-Warren region, then to unpaid internships within the area.
“Internships enable the student to gain practical experience, while expanding his [or] her network for job opportunities after graduation. In today’s competitive environment, an internship will position the student very well for future employment,” Carson said.
After graduating from YSU with a master’s degree in economics, Carson went on to become the chief U.S. economist at Deustche Bank, and now acts as the senior vice president and the director of Global Economic Research for AlianceBernstein — an investment management company.
Carson attributed part of his success to the skills and methods developed while at YSU.
“My time at YSU taught me how to solve problems, source information and think outside of the box. Also, it is important to realize that success in the business world requires hours and hours of study; in other words, one never stops being a student,” Carson said
Tod Porter, chair of the YSU Department of Economics, said that Carson, even outside of this scholarship, has been a highly active in the YSU community.
“He has been a very active alumnus,” Porter said. “He has come back on a pretty regular basis to talk either to the economics club or be a speaker at the economics department’s annual awards dinner.”
The goal of the scholarship is to bolster student participation in a wider range of internships by reducing the financial blow that unpaid or low paying internships can deliver.
Porter said students can earn up to $2,500, which is composed of both Carson’s own personal funds and funding from his firm. The new scholarship has apparently already begun to attract attention.
“I’m really excited about this. The first recipient of the scholarship is a student by the name of Ashley Orr,” Porter said. “She is going to do an internship in Cleveland at the Federal Reserve Bank, which is really just a fantastic opportunity for an economics major.”
Orr will work in a research capacity at the Federal Reserve, and she is using the scholarship to defray the cost of living in the city.
“I love working at the Federal Reserve. Their company culture is fabulous,” Orr said. “The position I’m interning for is research analyst. We each have different economic terms we work on. Last week I was working on consumer sentiment, and then this week I was working on analyzing some pension data. It is just really awesome.”
Orr said, though she has a few years left at YSU, there is a chance the internship could turn into a full hire down the road.
“They have a meeting for all their interns,” Orr said. “They said that the reason they created their internship program 12 years ago was because they wanted to have a way to recruit really good candidates to the bank and then get them to work there. They try to pull their new hires directly from the internship program, which is just really exciting to hear.”
Porter hopes that students will continue to take full advantage of the scholarship and seek out a more diverse range of internships.
“The department is very excited and grateful for this because we can give another opportunity to our majors. My hopes is what this is going to do is get some students thinking about internships outside of the area. One of the things I am hoping is that students might be more aggressive about pursuing internships with, let’s say, government agencies in Washington D.C. or financial institutions in New York or Chicago. Kind of expand the horizon of opportunity that they are looking at,” Porter said.
Comments are closed.