The Group plugs CSU with new scholarships

FORT COLLINS — The Group Inc. Real Estate is living up to its motto — “Have fun, make money, helping people” — by providing two freshman scholarships to the Colorado State University College of Business.

The two winners, Shannon Hoesing from Loveland High School and Angela Hoffner from Windsor High School, will each be awarded $3,062 for their first year at CSU.

The Group’s chairman, Larry Kendall, first approached CSU’s School of Business in November 1999 with the idea for the scholarships.

“We wanted to offer scholarships to attract the best and brightest students in the region to CSU,” Kendall said. “By setting an example, maybe other people will step up and offer similar scholarships. We’re hoping the idea will grow.”

The College of Business is banking that it will: The department’s “Students First — Business Scholars Initiative” has set down a goal of more than $2 million in endowed support to be secured by 2003.

“This is kind of the beginning of that,´ said Elaine Worzala, a professor at CSU’s finance and real estate department. “We don’t always get the best and brightest students. They don’t necessarily think of CSU first — they go out of state or down the road to the University of Colorado.”

And to attract the best and the brightest, she said, the college will need substantial scholarships.

“Most of our scholarships are much smaller,” she said. “A full-blown $3,000 like this is basically full tuition.”

Worzala provided The Group’s six-person scholarship committee a list of the 15 top applicants selected by the School of Business on March 9 — only one week before selections had to be finalized.

Of the 15 applications received, The Group interviewed the top six recent high-school graduates and, from those, chose the final two.

“The hardest thing was choosing the two recipients because they were all great,” Penne Berwick, The Group Scholars Chairman, said.

The applicants, who had to have a GPA of at least 3.5, were chosen based on what type of classes they took throughout their high-school career, community service, clubs they were involved in and extracurricular activities. All applicants had to be incoming CSU Business School students from Northern Colorado high schools, but enrollment in the College of Real Estate and Finance was not required.

In addition to the scholarships, the Group also is offering Hoesing and Hoffner internships of up to 10 hours per week during the school year, but the recipients do not have to accept them, Kendall said. “They would work directly for either myself or (Group president) Sharianne Daly, working in upper management, market research and analysis, and to see how you run a real estate company.”

Kendall said he is excited about the program and the quality of this year’s applicants, and hopes the program will continue. The Group pursued CSU specifically on the project because of its real estate and finance department, but other, similar, regional partnerships are not out of the question.

“We haven’t discussed UNC,” Kendall said, “but that’s something we could think about.”

The winners were to be awarded at a ceremony at CSU April 6 called Business Night Out, as well as at their senior awards night, May 16 at Windsor High School and May 25 at Loveland High School.

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