Pace Center partners with PICS summer internship program

The Class of 1969 Fund, which founded PICS in 1996 and continues to support the program, signed an agreement with the University in May 2010, Laura Spence-Ash, Pace Center senior program coordinator, said in an e-mail. Though students will interact with the PICS program through the Pace Center, the Class of 1969 Fund will still be responsible for securing internships, reviewing applications, conducting interviews, coordinating with alumni classes and managing funding.

Seva Jaffe Kramer, executive director of the Class of 1969 Fund, said in an e-mail that “one of the main goals is to turn PICS into the umbrella organization through which all alumni-initiated summer internships will originate.”

The partnership should also streamline operations, Spence-Ash explained. “The application process for PICS internships will remain very similar to that of prior years, although this year we will be using one application form for all internships administered by the Pace Center.

The new partnership arose as interest in PICS climbed steadily each year and the Class of 1969 Fund looked for ways to meet increased student demand. The PICS program received applications from 417 students this year, Kramer said, up from 347 in 2009, 310 in 2008 and 232 in 2007. Last summer, the PICS program placed 65 interns.

Kramer noted that the partnership has been in planning since spring 2008, after the Class of 1969 Fund approached the Pace Center with the idea of a formal partnership.

“We thought that if we could do something more formal, we could enhance opportunities for students, make the whole application process perhaps easier, and increase alumni involvement,” Kramer explained.

Chuck Freyer, chairman of the Class of 1969 Fund, said the Board held a meeting several years ago to determine “how best to ensure the continuation of the program as our Class disperses into retirement locations across the country, and how to grow the program to better serve the burgeoning demand for our internships among Princeton undergraduates.” Freyer explained that the Board decided to reach out to alumni from younger classes to help sponsor the program, and “capitalize on the University’s appreciation for what we had built” and partner with the Pace Center.

Among the steps taken to centralize the program, the Pace Center hired Spence-Ash, formerly the director of PICS, to oversee coordination of the student aspects of the program last fall. Afterward, a few operations were moved to Frist Campus Center, which houses the Pace Center.

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The location change proved useful to Yu-Sung Huang ’12, who interned through PICS at the New York City Economic Development Corporation this past summer. “Evaluations were all kept in Frist and that was amazingly helpful,” he explained. “I believe the main benefit of [PICS] being in Pace, was that before it was on Stockholm St., off-campus, but now it’s more accessible.”

The program reached a peak of 75 internships before “the great recession hit,” Kramer said. And as the program expanded, the Class of 1969 Fund has received help from many alumni classes, but most significantly from the Class of 1970 and the Class of 1977, she noted.

“The biggest change is number of internships and the second is the number of students interested,” she explained.

Elizabeth Parsons ’11, a former PICS intern who worked at Descanso Gardens in Los Angeles, offered a theory about the boom in student interest. “It is unique to Princeton to be able to have really well funded programs in the public sector, and it’s something that I believe more students should be able to participate in,” she said.