Tucked quietly on the first and second floors of Lyman Hall, student interns, clad in business attire, sit at desks behind secured doors, manning cybersecurity operations for JPMorgan Chase & Co.

The students are part of an ongoing relationship between the international banking corporation and Syracuse University. In addition to offering real-world internships to students, JPMorgan plays a large role on campus by helping develop curriculum, assisting professors in research projects and helping provide resources to the Institute for Veterans and Military Families, which opened a location on campus last week.

In April 2010, SU students protested the choice of JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon as the commencement speaker because of JPMorgan’s ties to campus as well as ‘the corporate banking world he represents,’ according to an April 16, 2010, article published by The Daily Orange.

Robert Heckman, a member of the senior program management team for the partnership, said the relationship between SU and JPMorgan dates back to summer 2007, when Frank Bisignano, chief administrative officer at JPMorgan, envisioned working with a university to develop a new curriculum to train information technology professionals. Bisignano and Chancellor Nancy Cantor eventually reached an agreement to collaborate, Heckman said.

More than 80 student interns, including graduate student Jonathan Sanchez, work out of JPMorgan’s technology center in Lyman. Students are charged with a number of tasks, Sanchez said.

Sanchez, an intern analyst on the computer incident security response team at JPMorgan, said he works on a team of nine to safeguard against security threats. Sanchez’s team, which identifies potential security issues to assure sensitive information is not compromised, is comprised of members in places such as the United Kingdom and India.

Because team members are located in different time zones, the information Sanchez’s group is in charge of overseeing is tended to throughout the whole day. If a large security breach is found, one team member alerts the others, Sanchez said.

‘Security is 24/7, so even though you get off of work and you’re not working, something’s still going on,’ he said.

Each intern begins work with the corporation with varying levels of skill, but Sanchez said senior JPMorgan employees are more than willing to help student interns fine-tune those skills.

‘JPMorgan builds this atmosphere that you come to work and appreciate who you work with,’ he said.

Beyond providing internships for students on campus, a curriculum project was also formed with the help of JPMorgan. Six academic programs have been created, or are in the process of receiving approval, said Heckman, also a senior associate dean in the School of Information Studies. In addition to helping fund academic programs, JPMorgan provides expertise on developing the curriculum by pairing a JPMorgan course adviser with a professor.

Students can minor in global enterprise technology, which focuses on how information systems are created and maintained. An extension of this, the Global Enterprise Technology Immersion Experience, places students with six-month internships at a JPMorgan. In addition to the immersion experience, 31 students took part in the university’s first two-week EuroTech trip during the summer. The students visited six European companies and looked into how each company manages information, Heckman said.

The GET curriculum is used for the veterans technology program, which is run through the iSchool and funded by JPMorgan. The program works to place those returning from war in tech-related careers, said Gina Lee-Glauser, vice president for research at SU who is also involved with the JPMorgan collaboration.

To date, 47 veterans have gone through the program. In addition to access to university resources, the program places a strong emphasis on one-on-one interaction between advisers and veterans, Lee-Glauser said. Often, veterans return to school following war and, for whatever reason, fall to the wayside and don’t complete their education.

‘They sign up and they just disappear,’ she said.

Because veterans in the veterans technology program work closely with mentors through intensive phone advising and frequent check-ins, Lee-Glauser said veterans often remain.

‘They are an SU student, first and foremost,’ Lee-Glauser said.

SU’s goal was to put 250 veterans through the program and gradually build from there. But, in a desire to ramp up education efforts for veterans, JPMorgan set a goal of putting 1,000 veterans through the program by 2012, Lee-Glauser said.

Though satisfying the one-on-one nature of the program may be difficult with such a large number of projected student veterans, the request characterized the push-and-pull relationship between SU and JPMorgan. Once JPMorgan set the goal, SU requested more funding to try to meet the goal, she said.

Last week’s ribbon-cutting ceremony for the Institute for Veterans and Military Families further indicates JPMorgan’s ties to SU. Separate from the veterans technology program, IVMF is headed by Mike Haynie, a professor in the Martin J. Whitman School of Management, and is supported by JPMorgan.

SU approached JPMorgan with the concept of the institute, which addresses veteran employment issues and helps veterans create small businesses, last spring, Haynie said. The corporation was receptive to the idea and funded $7.5 million for the institution.

Lauren Scalisi, an identity and access management intern and senior information technology major at SU, has a full-time job lined up with JPMorgan in Syracuse following graduation.

Scalisi, who works from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays, said having a job in proximity to class is one of the benefits of the on-campus internship.

‘It’s a great experience and it ties it all together,’ she said. ‘I feel like it’s more attainable for students. They know it’s here.’

dbtruong@syr.edu

Published on November 15, 2011 at 12:00 pm

Contact Debbie: dbtruong@syr.edu | @debbietruong