State Farm and FIU
Serving as a model for university corporate relationships, State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Company (State Farm) has developed a university-wide partnership with FIU, empowering units across the university to realize their Worlds Ahead vision.
State Farm has designated FIU as one of only 20 universities in the nation where they recruit exclusively, a reflection of the university’s significance as a leading Hispanic-serving institution. State Farm recognizes the benefit of partnering with a university like FIU to stay ahead of the demographic trends in the country. “We primarily come here to recruit language skills. The great thing about FIU is not only the Spanish language skills, but the diversity of language that’s available in the population here,” said Don Dye, State Farm college recruiter.
Most recently, this past April State Farm awarded FIU’s Discovery Lab with a grant of $50,000 to further the lab’s mission to inspire student innovation in the School of Computing and Information Sciences. This award was one of only four such grants awarded in the area of IT Systems this year by State Farm.
A University-Wide Partnership
The donation builds on the success of FIU’s longstanding partnership with State Farm. The corporation has supported a variety of initiatives across the university, including the State Farm Financial Literacy Lab at FIU’s College of Business Administration, a state-of-the-art trading, research and teaching laboratory designed to empower students and the community with knowledge of capital market activities, including equity and debt issuance, investment analysis, financial planning, cash management, derivatives and investment management. The $200,000 grant will support financial service learning projects during 2011-2014, a reflection of State Farm’s commitment to foster financial literacy in the region’s underserved communities.
Barry Shiflett, executive director of Career Management Services in the College of Business Administration, appreciates State Farm’s holistic approach. “There’s a difference between college relations and college recruiting and State Farm is definitely is in the college relations category…. They don’t just post job notices. They’re involved in career fairs and mock interviews. They sit on our advisory board. We call that total involvement,” he said.
In alignment with the corporation’s efforts to engage a diverse spectrum of the campus community, the financial literacy grant is just one component of State Farm’s university-wide partnership. In addition to this financial literacy award, State Farm pledged a $20,000 grant to support several initiatives that provide mentorship, scholarship and leadership training opportunities to FIU students through various programs, including Upward Bound, the 2010-11 Young Alumni and Student Seminar Series and the 2011 Student Leadership Summit.
“I’m just so proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish with FIU and I see it as just a beginning of our efforts,” said Cheryl Herrin, State Farm operations vice president and chair of the State Farm Education Initiative in Florida.
Click here to view the State Farm High School Financial Literacy Initiative Recruitment Event.