When Denver civic and business leaders try to attract highly skilled, well-educated people to work here, they still sometimes encounter negative stereotypes.
“Everything from ‘It snows all the time’ to ‘Do they have flush toilets?”‘ said Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corp.
In one step aimed at eliminating those stereotypes, and with the goal of adding to the city’s increasingly robust business climate, the Colorado Yale Association last year started a summer internship program to bring talented students to Denver and expose them to the city’s many benefits.
“When I look around Denver, I think that John Malone and Phil Anschutz have made huge contributions to Denver,” said Howard Holme, who is organizing the program for the Colorado Yale Association. “It’s highly unusual and capable people who can do that, and that’s the type of students that we are trying to bring here.”
Malone, Liberty Media Corp. chairman, is from Connecticut and a Yale alum, while mogul An schutz moved to Denver after graduating from the University of Kansas.
Yale student Emily Bernier grew up in New York and came to Denver for the first time this summer, concluding: “It’s definitely a real city.
“Everybody just really seems to love it here,” said Bernier, who is doing an internship as a junior software engineer at construction management firm PB Americas Inc. “I think I’m definitely going to be looking for some jobs out here,” as well as in New York.
The Yale group partners with local employers to offer the internships, including Aimco, Bow River Capital Partners, the Colorado Nonprofit Development Center and the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. This year, Middlebury College joined the program. Twenty-four students from the two colleges came to Denver for the internships this summer.
The group hopes to broaden the program to include more elite colleges in future years.
Holme, a Denver native, said he decided to get involved in the program because students graduating from top schools often end up in New York, Boston, Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Denver still faces challenges standing up to those cities. Holme hopes those who have done internships here will come back to Denver five to 10 years after graduating, when they are ready to raise a family.
“One of our goals is to attract the kids who have grown up on the East Coast and don’t know anything else, to understand how good the rest of the country is,” Holme said.
“We’ve historically had a difficult time getting employees for companies in the Northeast to move to Denver,” Clark said. “Even if those interns choose to take jobs in the Northeast, their experience in Denver will probably help us in the long term with other people.”
Clark thinks those unfamiliar with Denver often find it to be “a delightful surprise.”
“At a minimum they’re ambassadors for the high quality of life in Denver,” said Rowan Claypool, who started the first such Yale internship program in Louisville, Ky., nine years ago because Louisville was experiencing a brain drain.
Since that program started, 27 of the former interns moved to Louisville – a preview of the kind of impact the Denver program might have.
“This is changing the course of the river,” Claypool said.
Staff writer Kelly Yamanouchi can be reached at 303-954-1488 or at kyamanouchi@denverpost.com.
