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Building Bridges The town with the world's most bridges per capita has a knack for linking students to opportunities.
Sarah Gross studied the past, helped manage the present, and is now shaping the future. Sarah created her own undergraduate curriculum in Holocaust history, and studied the rise and fall of the New Economy in grad school. Her ideas got the ear of the region's top elected official, and she served a one-year fellowship as a trusted advisor to the county's chief executive. Now she's the operations director of an internationally renowned economic consulting group run by one of her former professors, Richard Florida. Their mission: to show cities how to be hip, diverse-and rich. That's Pittsburgh for you. It's the center of a region of 2.4 million people, where students' opinions and talents aren't just academic. "There are a lot of people here who are very open to discussion and are interested in what young people coming to the region have to say," says Sarah. The town with the world's most bridges per capita has a knack for linking students to opportunities. And the city of three rivers is a place where you flow easily from the classroom into fascinating jobs in technology, finance, the arts and government. |
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Pittsburgh's universities, companies and governments have teamed up to
create the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center, featuring one of the
fastest computers in the world; the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering
Initiative, which is inventing replacement organs for the chronically
ill; economic "greenhouses" that are spawning new biotechnology and
computer chip firms; and the Regional Internship Center of
Southwestern PA, which helps students from 33 colleges and
universities to test drive hundreds of companies. The city is big enough to boast one of the top 10 medical research communities in the country, two of the world's largest banks, seven Fortune 500 companies, 310 international
corporations, and a technology council with 1,400 member firms. And
it's small enough that every student can get a piece of the action.
 "We
work with employers to make sure that they are getting interns to
complete projects that create tangible results for both the companies
and the students," says McCrae Holliday, Director of the Regional
Internship Center. Case in point: Ramesh Mishra came to Pittsburgh
from India to earn a masters degree in computer science, and is now
interning with Marconi, a major provider of technology to the telecommunications
industry. Marconi's main research and development campus is just north
of Pittsburgh. Within months of beginning his internship, Ramesh says,
"They gave me a full-blown project." The assignment: create tools
that would show a key customer exactly how much data was flowing through
an Ethernet networking module. "That's the kind of trust you always
want to have," he says. Marconi's faith paid off. Ramesh's tools are
working, and he's angling for a permanent job with Marconi or one
of the many other network technology companies in the Pittsburgh region.
Ramesh can only hope he has as much luck as Gina Frey. With its edgy exhibitions and Friday evening wine-and-music fests, Pittsburgh's Andy Warhol Museum seemed just the kind of place Gina wanted to work. So, in her senior year as a communications major, she got a marketing internship and found herself doing research and arranging partnerships with other organizations. Just as Gina graduated, her boss at The Warhol moved on. "I'd learned enough as an intern to get the position I had interned under," she says. Now The Warhol's communications associate, Gina is crafting mind-bending marketing for exhibitions on everyone from Elvis to John F. Kennedy. The Warhol is just one silk-screened shred in Pittsburgh's tapestry of culture. On any given weekend, you can choose from the ballet, theater, civic light opera, symphony, poetry forums, live music, live art, baroque and Bach choirs, galleries, dance, Penguins, Pirates, Steelers, museums of art, science, nature and history. Nearly all of the above offer student discounts or freebies. Clint Soose probably won't need student discounts for long. The senior majoring in finance has built two bridges into the world of big money. The first was his summer internship at the world headquarters of American Eagle Outfitters, just outside of Pittsburgh. There, he was thrown right into an internal auditing process that had him interviewing department heads. "I was really treated like one of the auditors," Clint says. Now he's continuing to help out at American Eagle, while also interning at the Pittsburgh branch of the global financial services giant, Morgan Stanley. He's talking with both companies, and others, about jobs. "The internships really give me something to talk about when going on job interviews," Clint says. He's seen corporate balance sheets in the classroom and from the viewpoints of a company auditor and a broker. That's how it goes in Pittsburgh, where those bridges can take you behind the scenes, to the cutting edge, or right to the top. Says Clint, "It's been the best experience I could have hoped for." To find out more about the educational opportunities in Pittsburgh check out the Pittsburgh Council Higher Education at www.pchepa.org.  |
