Non-elite student wins JPMorgan internship
- A University of Tennessee at Chattanooga student earned a JPMorgan summer internship in New York. - The profile highlights a specific undergrad landing a competitive internship outside top-tier brand schools. - The example shows banks still discover talent beyond elite campuses, supporting targeted school outreach over purely prestige-based funnels. (blog.utc.edu)
Ethan Tidwell, a junior at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, will spend this summer in New York City as a JPMorgan Chase & Co. intern. (blog.utc.edu) UTC said Tidwell is a double major in finance and accounting in the Gary W. Rollins College of Business, and the internship will last two months. He currently serves as vice president of research and development in the school’s Student Managed Investment Learning Experience, or SMILE Fund. (blog.utc.edu) Tidwell told UTC that he added finance as a second major after taking classes with Hunter Holzhauer, the Robert L. Maclellan and UC Foundation associate professor of finance. Holzhauer said Tidwell stood out early because “analytically, he’s at the top.” (blog.utc.edu) JPMorgan says its undergraduate internships typically run 10 to 12 weeks and are aimed at students in their next-to-last year of college. The bank also runs pre-internship programs and school programs for students earlier in the pipeline. (jpmorganchase.com) That structure helps explain how a student from Chattanooga can surface in a New York recruiting process. JPMorgan’s Career.edYOU Academy, for example, said 910 sophomores from 246 colleges and universities took part in its 2024 virtual program for U.S. college students. (jpmorganchase.com) UTC’s pitch to employers is hands-on training, not just classroom work. The SMILE Fund says students manage a real investment portfolio, and the university says the fund has grown from $250,000 in 2015 to more than $3.5 million in assets under management. (utc.edu) The program has also built a track record in outside competitions. UTC said its SMILE Fund team won the CFA Institute Greater Tennessee Research Challenge for the 10th straight year in March 2026 after competing against 10 other universities. (blog.utc.edu) Tidwell was part of that ecosystem before the JPMorgan offer arrived. UTC’s March 2026 coverage of the CFA challenge listed him among the students tied to the winning SMILE Fund effort, linking his internship to a program that has been producing finance competition results for years. (blog.utc.edu) Tidwell told UTC he treated the offer as the result of repeated preparation rather than a single recruiting win. This summer, that preparation moves from a student-run fund in Chattanooga to a JPMorgan office in New York. (blog.utc.edu)
