WAER Radio CNY scholarships with Kevin Hanna

6/7/17

Roughly 40 CNY students middle to high school who completed STEM internships in multiple businesses
were honored at Le Moyne College yesterday at the 23rd annual STEM Scholars program. John Drago and
Eric Lymph were awarded scholarships four years ago and just completed their electrical computing
engineering degrees. STEM chairman Dom Amenziatos said both students have already landed local jobs
before graduation.

We are celebrating the fact that the graduates who are here today chose to live and work and give back
to CNY. That is part of our hopeful plan when we established the scholarships and its actually cultivating
the kind of report that we thought it would.

The scholarships were established by a conservancy in 2013 with the hopes of bolstering the growth in
STEM fields in the region. The awards were hosted by Partners in Education and Business, better known
as PEB. The nonprofit seeks to bridge the gap between the school system and the business world.

AT&Ts Director of External Affairs, Kevin Hanna, finds the programs helps the students acquire real
world experience.

They have an idea of what the future could be for them. And so the membership is an extremely
important component as well as some of the academic work and the other experiences that they have.

STEM skills are a huge demand in the U.S. The CNY STEM Scholars program hopes to help that out by
filling the demand. Executive Director of the PEB, Joe Fargo, believes many Central New Yorkers dont
even realize the potential of 600-thousand vacant STEM jobs across the country.

We have an e-tech program that allows students to go out for job shadowing and internships in
advanced manufacturing and the focus areas are electrical and mechanical technology. For the
scholarships, we have two and four year scholarships, many of them are technology scholarships at the
core level. Many of them are electrical computer or mechanical engineering.

Students can learn more about the program at cnystem.com