Highland Village Native Spends Summer As SMU Maguire Intern

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Ricketts' giving the SMU 'Pony Up!' sign at the Taj Mahal.

DALLAS, TX (08/08/2013)(readMedia)-- DALLAS (SMU) - SMU sophomore Elizabeth Ricketts, traveled from Highland Village, Texas to Bangalore, India to serve as a Maguire Public Service Intern and learn firsthand the value of helping people and communities in need.

Ricketts, studying mechanical engineering, helped coordinate educational workshops with the Water Literacy Project to raise awareness about water conservation.

The Maguire Ethics and Irby Family Foundation Public Service Internships are sponsored by SMU's Cary M. Maguire Center for Ethics & Public Responsibility. Each intern is responsible for finding agencies to sponsor their projects, which ultimately are selected for their proposals' ethical and social justice merits.

"These students are setting the course for the rest of their lives and are an inspiration to those who teach and support them. As their efforts show, they are indeed world changers," says Maguire Ethics Center Director Rita Kirk.

Such public service internship grants "help students like me pursue internships in the nonprofit and public sectors," says Rahfin Faruk. "With increasing financial pressures, I'm extremely thankful the Maguire Center has helped me gain development and international relations experience, first at Grameen Bank and now at the U.S. Department of State."

"By providing students cash awards for public service and ethics research projects, these SMU students can commit to the public service projects they always wanted to do, but didn't have the financial resources to make possible," says Candy Crespo, assistant director of the Maguire Ethics Center.

For the past 16 years, Public Service Internships have been awarded to nearly 140 SMU students who have served in more than 100 agencies in more than a dozen countries.

To read more about Ricketts' experience read her blog.

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