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Portland SIM scholarships help Oregon State BIS students

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November 12, 2012

Daniel Changkuon is a problem solver.

As the president of the Oregon State University Students in Information Management (SIM) Club, Changkuon is helping work on a project to extract quiz scores from a SharePoint site automatically, so professors don’t have to manually.

“For professors it’s time consuming looking through those reports, so I help the professor get only the results of what the student has done in SharePoint,” he said. “That reduces for the professor something that took hours to a couple of minutes.”

It’s those skills that made Daniel an Oregon State recipient of a scholarship from the Portland Chapter of the Society for Information Management.

This year the OSU College of Business received $17,500 in scholarships from Portland SIM, one of a number of gifts the group makes every year to information technology programs in the state to support students such as Daniel.

This summer Daniel interned at Nike and plans to graduate this year. He hopes to get a job working with IT security.

A native of Ecuador, Daniel said the scholarship has been a great help to his family and helped allow time for him to take part in experiential learning opportunities such as SIM Club.

“It helps me a lot, “ Daniel said. “Especially being an international student, my tuition is almost three times higher than a resident from Oregon, which makes it harder for me and harder for my family. Having a scholarship is a big help for me. Sometimes I have to work a bit more hours to pay all my things, so I’m always grateful.”

The funds came from corporate sponsorships of the Portland SIM 11th Annual Golf Tournament. Overall the events have raised more than $250,000 for SIM scholarships throughout the state.

In addition to financial support, scholarship winners receive more training and networking opportunities with the organization.

Olga Matysina, now an IT consultant with the Oregon State College of Business, received a scholarship her final term at OSU.

Matysina said almost more important than the financial assistance was the opportunities and connections the scholarship opened up with SIM Club events and trips.

“I thought the introduction to professionals in my field was the biggest benefit,” Matysina said. “They gave us advice on how they progressed in their career.”

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