By ACE Ambassador Michael Courtney.

My name is Michael Courtney and I am a senior in the college of ACES studying Consumer Economics and Finance with a minor in Leadership Studies.

When I was deciding where to attend college, I had a number of criteria to sort through. Did I want to go to a big school or a small school? What did I want to study? Where did I want to work when I graduated?  All of these questions came to mind when I was choosing a school, and ACES was the result.

ACES is a hidden gem at the University of Illinois. It is a small school atmosphere nestled in a Big Ten campus. I know almost all of my professors and advisors by name and they know me. Only in ACES can we have class sizes with a ratio of 18 students to 1 instructor, while you are on campus with nearly 40,000 other undergraduate students.

As far as what I wanted to study, I knew I had an interest in business, and I felt that ACE provided a nice mixture of business as well as agricultural education. I was really drawn to ACES when I saw the list of companies that recruits from the college. Seed companies, Ag. Companies, Rail Roads, Manufactories, Banks and Financial Institutions, Government agencies and so many more. It seemed like I could go to into school, narrow down my focus, and then choose my future based on my discovered interests.

I knew that interning while at school would be very important and so I began to look for opportunities. I talked to friends, faculty, recent grads, my faculty mentor, and the hard work paid off.

In the spring semester of my sophomore year, I moved to Orlando, Florida for eight months to complete the Disney College Program. In this internship I lived and worked at the flagship resort of the Walt Disney Company serving as a ferryboat captain at Epcot. I learned customer service, passenger logistics, gained emergency response training, as well as served as a spanish translator for spanish speaking guests. Besides this, I took classes through the Disney Institute, and completed a term paper while working with a faculty sponsor at the University of Illinois.

This was a fantastic experience and something that employers and interviewers still ask about today.

I had such a great experience on my first internship, that I immediately began looking for another for the end of my Junior year. I applied, interviewed, went to career fairs, and by the end of the school year, had job offers from the Federal Reserve Bank, Target Corporation, and J.P.Morgan Chase.

I took a job with J.P. Morgan in the corporate and investment bank working on an energy tax equity portfolio. My main role was to help manage assets that the bank had invested in, which were predominantly wind farms. My job was to track production and revenue data, look for production delays, forecast wind turbine down time as well as interact with our clients to troubleshoot issues and answer questions. During the summer I also worked on a couple of special projects which included analyzing buy out offer on one of our farms, as well as redesigning and testing an internal J.P.Morgan database.

I had a fantastic experience working for J.P. Morgan. It was a great internship and a great real world work experience, as I was able to use what I had learned in class and apply it to my work.

I am very grateful to the college of ACES for the opportunities they have afforded me during my college career and internships. I am fortunate to have had such outstanding professors, advisors, TA’s who made me as successful as I was. This small college feel at the University was exactly what I was looking for in a college.