Administration

GE receives Penn State Corporate Partner of the Year Award

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Penn State honored General Electric (GE) as its Corporate Partner of the Year at an event on Friday, Nov. 22. University President Rodney A. Erickson presented the award to GE in celebration of the company’s longstanding philanthropic commitment to Penn State.

“For more than 45 years, GE has maintained a remarkable partnership with Penn State that exemplifies both organizations’ commitment to educating a global workforce and promoting innovation,” said Erickson. “Through their generosity to the University, the company’s leaders have acknowledged the great value of that partnership.”

GE is one of the world’s largest corporations, with more than 300,000 employees and operations in over 140 countries. It also is one of the oldest major companies in the United States, tracing its beginnings to the Edison Electric Light Company founded by Thomas A. Edison in 1878. Headquartered in Fairfield, Connecticut, GE today operates multiple businesses within the broad sectors of energy, health and home, transportation, and finance.

In the course of its partnership with Penn State, GE has provided more than $24 million in funding for philanthropy and sponsored research, including more than $1 million in the past year alone. “Our ongoing research partnerships facilitate the company’s groundbreaking work, and the recruiting relationship we’ve built provides GE with skilled people who can imagine the future and bring great ideas to fruition,” said Erickson. “In turn, GE helps Penn State to fulfill its own mission of educating and serving our community and generating knowledge and technologies that make the world a better place.”

“Together, GE and Penn State are building the future’s great leaders. We are partnering on programs to inspire future generations of innovators, addressing critical issues like sustainable energy solutions, to create a world that works better,” said GE Chairman of the Board and CEO Jeffrey Immelt, who accepted the award on behalf of GE. “Penn State is a big part of our future, and it’s an honor for GE to be named Corporate Partner of the Year.”

GE’s gifts and investments have made possible such Penn State programs as Faculty for the Future, a ten-year, $20 million initiative designed to increase the number of women and under-represented minority faculty members in engineering, related sciences, and business. Partnering with such initiatives as the Applied Professional Experience Program (APEX) in the Smeal College of Business, GE sponsors collaborative projects that provide students with valuable real-world experiences.

“Programs like these help Penn State produce highly skilled graduates, many of whom go on to become valued employees and leaders for GE,” said Erickson. Penn State is among GE’s top five schools for recruitment, and the company currently employs about 1,270 Penn State alumni. Those alumni recently came together as one team to develop the GE-Penn State Alumni Scholarship Fund for Engineering, Business and IST students.

Further demonstrating a shared vision between the company and the University, GE recently established the GE Competing for the Future Scholarship in Business and Engineering, which will support exceptional undergraduate students in the College of Engineering and the Smeal College, and committed to sponsoring research in the College of Engineering on the UG Mining Durathon Battery Advanced Packaging project, which will study the feasibility of employing GE’s industrial battery in underground mine cars.

Former Penn State Corporate Partners of the Year include Chevron, Toshiba/Westinghouse, Dow Chemical, Boeing, Highmark, PNC, Barnes and Noble, Lockheed Martin, and Bank of America.

Last Updated December 2, 2013

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