FELLOWSHIPS SOAR
Thanks to multiple efforts across campus, more Wabash students than ever are exploring businesses and the world.
Taking Off
It’s mid-June and Fellowship Advisor Susan Albrecht still has a student in her office.
Taylor King ’18 didn’t have an appointment—he has already won an international fellowship. Two, in fact—a Fulbright to Germany and a United States Teaching Assistantship to Austria. He chose the USTA and will be studying in Vienna this coming academic year.
King was on campus and just stopped by to talk about his travel plans and about World Cup soccer, one of Albrecht’s passions.
Albrecht’s rapport with students—her firm guidance of and advocacy for them—is a major reason for the record number of fellowships earned by Wabash students.
Professor Eric Olofson and the College’s Graduate Fellowships Committee recommended the College create the fellowships coordinator position after wondering why more students weren’t taking advantage of these opportunities. Albrecht added the role to her duties as Library Visual Media Liaison and took off running.
Jacob Burnett ’15 earned a Rhodes Scholarship in Albrecht’s first year, but a better gauge of her success are the Gilman Scholars.
Sponsored by the U.S. State Department, Gilman Scholarships provide financial aid for students of limited financial means to study or intern abroad. It should be a good fit for many Wabash students, so Albrecht was surprised that the College had yet to have a Gilman Scholar. She decided to change that, putting the word out through faculty, email, special events, and an article in The Bachelor.
That was 2015.
Wabash has since produced 10 Gilman Scholars.
The National Association of Wabash Men has noticed. Albrecht was the recipient of the NAWM’s 2018 Butler-Turner Student- Alumni Engagement Award.
GETTING REAL
Thanks to the work of Schroeder Center for Career Development and Career Services and the Center for Innovation, Business, and Entrepreneurship, 14 Wabash men have earned Orr Fellowships during the past nine years.
Every Orr Fellow seems to have a moment when things “get real.”
For Greg Slisz ’10, it was a project where he had to create a new process for tracking and managing revenue in advance of Exact Target’s efforts to go public.
For Daniel Purvlicis ’16, it was testing, troubleshooting, and coordinating fixes with software engineers in advance of a product launch at Blue Pillar.
For Ty Benefiel ’08, it was having his desk right next to Angie’s List Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder Angie Hicks.
“I learned so much,” Benefiel says, “I learned daily what it took to be a successful entrepreneur.”
While all these former Orr Fellows have gone on to interesting business-minded ventures, none were business-focused when they arrived at Wabash.
“Absolutely not,” says Purvlicis. “I had no idea where I’d end up. I was as green as you could have been.”
The highly competitive Orr Fellowship pairs recent college graduates with host companies in Indianapolis for two years to develop the next generation of business leaders and entrepreneurs in Indiana.
“You get that seat at the table. You get placed in those organizations,” says Blaine Cooper-Surma ’09, who was paired with Exact Target from 2009 to 2011. “The investment you make to get that level of access serves as a springboard throughout your career.” —Richard Paige