Scholarships attract, retain bright students
The combination of school, work, family issues and financial pressures has at times made Joshua Key-Bieber consider quitting school. But he has managed to keep going and focusing on his future, in large part because of a $2,000 Society for Information Management (SIM) Scholarship he received this year.
Photo: A group of scholarship recipients gather before a recent DISC meeting. From left are: Jeremy Knorr, Kevin Smithson, Christine Abrazaldo, Rozaliya Everstova, Joshua Key-Bieber, and Erik Lowell.
Joshua Key-Bieber isn’t your average college student.
The junior CIS major has a 2-year-old son and is in the process of adopting his sister’s 2-year-old daughter. He also works full-time as a technical service specialist while pursuing his W. P. Carey degree.
The combination of school, work, family issues and financial pressures has at times made Key-Bieber consider quitting school. But he has managed to keep going and focus on his future, in large part because of a $2,000 Society for Information Management (SIM) Scholarship he received this year.
“It's the people who provide support for students and the ability to succeed through scholarships, grants, internships and much more that give me hope,” said Key-Bieber, who is one of eight W. P. Carey Department of Information Systems undergraduates to receive CIS scholarships this school year.
Key-Bieber said his SIM scholarship enables him to focus on his long-term goal of helping save lives through technology by joining or establishing a federal or medical institution that analyzes and increases the efficiency and effectiveness of vital information.
“This scholarship will not only ensure I graduate on schedule in 2016, but has also given me the opportunity to focus more on family and school rather than a second job,” he said.
Scholarships mean everything
Key-Bieber’s ability to continue his education is a prime example of how important a scholarship can be to recruiting and retaining the brightest students to the CIS program.
“Scholarships mean everything to us,” said Raghu Santanam, chairman of the W. P. Carey Department of Information Systems.
“We have very few scholarships available to students in CIS. The ones we are offering are great, but our intent is to increase the number of scholarships available to our students.”
The department currently offers three CIS scholarships. The SIM Scholarships award $2,000 each to three students, the Richard Malone CIS Scholarships, supported by Edward D. Jones & Co. provide $1,000 each to four students, and the new ISACA Phoenix Scholarship, which awards $830 to one student.
Like Key-Bieber, senior CIS student Rozaliya Everstova was able to overcome obstacles with the help of an SIM Scholarship.
A native of Yakutsk, Republic of Sakha, Russia, Everstova spent seven years as a newspaper and TV journalist and completed most of her degree in broadcast journalism before moving to Arizona and enrolling as a CIS student. But she discovered that qualifying for scholarships is difficult for foreign transfer students.
“It is hard for me to get scholarships as I am a transfer student and didn't graduate from high school in the U.S.” Everstova said. “Unfortunately, even having a diverse cultural and ethnic background didn't help me to get financial support from ASU.”
“Receiving the SIM Scholarship encourages me to put more efforts toward achieving my dreams. The scholarship gave me the recognition for my achievements and also the inspiration to work harder.”
CIS junior and Phoenix native Jeremy Knorr Jr., who changed his major from computer science as a first-year student and “found my niche,” said the SIM Scholarship allows him to almost completely avoid taking out student loans this year.
“The SIM Scholarship has helped me immensely,” Knorr said. “I think most college students can relate to the aspiration of being independent. For me, part of that includes supporting myself financially through school. As a result (of the scholarship), I will be that much closer to being able to pay off my student debt after I graduate.”
Richard Malone Scholarship
The Richard Malone CIS Scholarship honors the St. Louis-based Edward Jones’ retired CIO and is the longest-running of the three CIS scholarships.
Malone stressed the importance of training technology students in the basics of business in an interview published by KnowIt nearly a decade ago. He said businesses and universities need to work together to determine how to prepare a new generation of leaders for rapidly converging disciplines.
“You can’t be just a technology person per se anymore, without clearly understanding the business that you’re working for — how it works and how you can help apply technology to that business,” Malone said. “People coming to the business side are also going to be very knowledgeable about technology … I think it’s up to the universities to help both those sides, and understand the crossover’s taking place.”
Erik Lowell, a Las Vegas native and recipient of a Malone Scholarship, embodies that philosophy.
After starting out as a W. P. Carey accounting major, he heard about the CIS program from friends and advisors.
“After some research I found that the accounting and CIS majors work well together, not only in school, but in the business world as well,” said Lowell, now a senior. “I would like to find a job that would allow me to use the skills from both my majors, perhaps working in auditing or internal control management.”
Problem-solving skills
Malone Scholarship recipient Khanh Phan, who was born in Vietnam, also recognized the business applications of CIS, which led him to change his major from finance.
“The problem-solving and critical-thinking skills involved in CIS were something that really captured my attention,” said Phan, a sophomore. “In mathematics, often times there is a single correct answer to a question, but in CIS often times there can be many solutions to a question. With a degree in CIS, I want to be able to protect companies from hackers, and help organizations to operate more effectively.”
Phan said the scholarship not only helps him financially and motivates him to achieve his goals, “it is also the proof that my hard work is starting to pay for itself.”
Christine Abrazaldo, a CIS junior from Santa Monica, Calif., sees the Malone Scholarship as a key ingredient in her quest to someday getting hired as the CIO of a company.
“At first, I was a business law major and towards the end of my first year of college I decided to switch to CIS,” Abrazaldo said. “I always had a passion for technology and liked the technical and business slant of the major.”
Malone Scholar Kevin Smithson, a senior from Glendale, taught himself HTML in middle school and built a website to post photos — before the days of MySpace and Facebook.
He also took computer courses in high school but detoured after graduation to work in retail for six years before realizing that his passion was working with computers.
“I decided to take a risk and quit my management job and go back to school,” Smithson said. “So far everything has been falling into place. I had an awesome internship with APS over the summer and I am looking forward to starting a new career after graduation.”
Smithson is pursuing a double major of CIS and Business Data Analysis — the department's new degree offering. “It gives me a lot of options for what I could possibly do as a career,” he said. “My two biggest interests are programming and working in business intelligence.”
ISACA Phoenix Scholarship
The newest scholarship for W. P. Carey CIS students is the ISACA Phoenix Scholarship, sponsored by the Phoenix chapter of the Information Systems Audit and Control Association. Aaron Carpenter, president of the chapter, explains the commitment behind this scholarship.
“ISACA has had a long relationship with the W. P. Carey School and is proud to contribute to the development of our industry's future by sponsoring this scholarship endowment,” he said. “Many of our members are ASU graduates or have connections with ASU so the scholarship seems a natural way for us to contribute. W. P. Carey’s CIS program is world class and we know that by helping first-rate students the prestige of the program and ultimately the industry will be strengthened.”
The first recipient, Peter Heilman, a junior from Mesa, postponed college to work as a legal assistant and managing paralegal for four years before deciding to attend ASU. He chose the CIS major with an eye toward a career in network/information security.
He was an intern last semester with the state of Arizona's ASET (Arizona Strategic Enterprise Technology), working as a business analyst and an information security professional.
“The CIS degree is giving me the necessary programming knowledge to relate to analysts and technicians in the field,” Heilman said. “My degree is setting me up for a career in information security, whether through a regulatory and enforcement capacity, with a federal agency or with a private company doing defense contract work.
“I do appreciate the commercial side of the security business, but I feel that my passion leans more towards a government agency or government contractor working in an attempt to secure our nation's infrastructure.”
Heilman said the ISACA Scholarship not only is giving him more financial freedom to complete his degree, it also is helping pay fees associated with pursuing several Cisco certifications.
“These certifications will help me stand out in the security industry's market for new graduates,” he said. “I am currently pursuing the CCENT (Cisco Certified Entry Network Technician) certification so I can better market myself as a technical professional with the network knowledge required to impact enterprise network security.”
Well-trained students
Santanam, the IS department chairman, stressed that CIS graduates are quite successful at landing jobs after graduation and enjoy among the highest starting salaries received by W. P. Carey graduates because they are well-prepared to hit the ground running.
“It is a very relevant major for organizations, considering the shortage of talent,” he said. “CIS students are trained to contribute from day one. That’s why recruiters keep coming back. Our students have the skills that are needed.”
Santanam said W. P. Carey stresses the readiness of CIS graduates to potential scholarship donors, including alumni and executives of companies that recruit students. Those stakeholders are given the opportunity to meet with students and attend meetings of DISC (the Department of Information Systems Club).
“There are more points of engagement with students and we leverage that when requesting scholarship donations,” he said.
Santanam added that the IS department is focusing on enrolling more students in the CIS and BDA majors (there are currently 500 and 120 enrolled, respectively) because there is a shortage of workers in those fields.
“We are working on it,” he said. “How? By developing more scholarships. It is partly our job to educate stakeholders about how scholarships encourage bright students to enter the field, thereby expanding the pipeline of talented workers.”
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