“Without this scholarship, I would not be where I am today. It’s had a huge impact on my life, because it’s given me so many opportunities,” said Mikayla Marini, a senior business major and a recipient of the Joseph E. Pressutti Scholarship offered by the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation. The scholarship freed Marini to take an internship that opened her eyes to her career passion, which led to a professional position before finishing college. Graduating this semester with her career already launched, Marini feels that she is right where she wants to be.
More students will have this kind of opportunity in the future, thanks to a new $97,000 donation from the Presutti family that will expand the scholarship program from two scholarships to three.
The Pressutti Scholarship was established in 2011 in memory of Joseph E. Pressutti, a Craig School of Business alumnus and Fitzgerald Foundation board member. The scholarship provides direct financial support to business students with demonstrated financial need, high GPA and a continuing commitment to community service.
For Presutti’s son, Joe Pressutti, president of The Market Grocery Store in Fresno, the scholarship is an important multigenerational link between his father’s commitment to Fresno State and the promise of new opportunities for students for years to come.
“I know my father would be thrilled by this scholarship and seeing kids realize their dreams through the business program at Fresno State and benefiting from his name and his association with Ella Fitzgerald. My dad was my hero, and being able to keep his name alive in the community is personally very fulfilling to me,” Pressutti said.
The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation was founded in 1993 by the legendary 20th-century jazz singer and civil rights activist Ella Fitzgerald, who recorded some of the most influential interpretations of jazz classics and the Great American Songbook. The Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation provides grants to bring education, literacy and music education to children and underserved communities. The Pressutti Scholarship is the only Fitzgerald Foundation program that supports business administration students.
Joe Pressutti feels that business education develops the mind just as much as the arts and humanities.
“Business, more than anything else, is learning how to solve problems. You have to keep an open mind. My dad had a very outside-the-box kind of mind that was honed from years of running businesses and working with people. Business education gives you a career, but it also helps you in life,” Pressutti said.
Randal Rosman, vice president of the Ella Fitzgerald Charitable Foundation, said that the foundation seeks to free students from one of their greatest fears, excessive student debt.
“The main goal of all of our Fitzgerald Foundation scholarships is to allow students to attend college who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford it and graduate college with as little debt as possible,” Rosman said. “We want students to have a clean slate when they move out into the world post-college instead of being saddled with massive amounts of debt.”
For Marini, the help from the Pressutti Scholarship gave her the freedom to test new experiences and think hard about her career goals.
“I have a twin brother, so my parents have done everything for us at the same time, and going to college at the same time is pretty difficult,” Marini said. “I was going to have to have two jobs to pay for college. Because of the scholarship, I was able to take an internship that covered one of my marketing electives. Little did I know that that internship would show me my passion and help me learn what I want to do.”
Marini’s internship led directly to her working full-time as a marketing professional while she is still finishing her degree.
“The internship opened so many doors for me. I loved that job, and then I got another opportunity because of it, and I never would have had this without the ability my scholarship gave me to put myself out there,” Marini said.
Alumna Amairany Rodriguez, who graduated in 2022 with a degree in human resources management, was also able to pursue her career goals while still in college because of the Pressutti Scholarship.
“The scholarship freed me to apply to internships whether they were paid or unpaid. So I did an internship that helped me land my first full-time HR job when I was a junior in college, which gave me a lot of experience. Right after graduation, I switched to a new job,which is where I am now, and I just recently got promoted to a senior HR business partner,” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez added that the support she received from the Presutti Scholarship incentivized her to pursue her studies seriously.
“I think getting the scholarship made me even more ambitious,” Rodriguez said. “I was a first-generation college student, my parents never came from money, so I knew I had to work hard through high school to get a scholarship. And being able to get an opportunity like this, I wanted to keep it, and that was an incentive to keep taking good notes, studying and passing tests.”
