Private Giving
Penn State Intercom......April 17, 2003

Picower Foundation grant funds
seminar for Smeal freshmen

The Smeal College of Business Administration has been awarded a grant from The Picower Foundation for the development of an expanded seminar for first-year undergraduate business students.

The one-year grant of $250,000 is renewable for the next three years for a total of
$1 million, with The Smeal College contributing an additional $100,000 annually.

The grant will support the Picower Embark Program (PEP), which seeks to improve transition from high school to college and retention within college; provide personal development in the areas of diversity, ethical behavior, business leadership, teamwork, life management and community service; and enhance the inclusion of underrepresented students in the full spectrum of business majors and careers.

The PEP curriculum will emphasize action learning; engaging students with each other in community service projects; weeklong leadership forums for selected students; and ethical role-playing with trained facilitators. Additionally, PEP will improve opportunities for students to meet senior faculty in a conversational settings to explore academic values, interests and career ideas.

Following development of the specific PEP curricula, the first Smeal students will enter the program in January 2004. After the initial year, course support materials will be developed for distribution and adoption by other universities, leading to a PEP National Conference at Penn State at the end of the Picower grant period in 2006. Materials developed for PEP will be shared at other Big Ten
and National Conferences, and made available through print and Internet formats.

The Picower Foundation supports a wide range of educational, arts and medical research programs across the country. With a mission of helping people improve the quality of their lives by providing services that enable them to become productive, self-sufficient and healthy, the foundation concentrates on a variety of activities including innovations in schools, curriculum development, after-school and summer programming, the arts, tolerance education and biomedical research.

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