Grace Janzow

Economics and studio art seems like an incongruous double major, but it is not such an odd coupling for Grace Janzow ’15, who believes her focus on each interest helped land her a job with the financial services firm JPMorgan Chase & Co. in Columbus, Ohio.

After graduating, Janzow will assume a position in the firm’s two-year development program, where she will work as an operations analyst in the Consumer & Community segment.

“Everybody says that art and economics is such a bizarre combination, but they worked both sides of my brain — my right side for creativity and my left side for logic and analysis. That was something Chase valued: the ability to think about a situation from all sides,” Janzow said.

Janzow accepted the post after meeting with a JPMorgan Chase representative during an on-campus visit arranged through the Career Development Office. The company recruiter selected her for follow-up interviews in Columbus. She learned in the fall of her senior year that she was hired, easing anxiety about post-graduate uncertainty. “It was a big relief, and still is,” she said. “I can’t believe that I had something this concrete lined up so early. It happened so fast.”

A native of Clarence, N.Y., Janzow enrolled at Kenyon to take advantage of a studio art scholarship in conjunction with a liberal arts background. “I wanted a fine arts education, but also had many other interests,” she said. “I knew at Kenyon I would be engaged in other disciplines as well.”

During campus visits, she sensed something else unusual about the college. “Other schools focused on what they could do for you, but Kenyon focused on what I could do for it. Kenyon saw something in me that it wanted, and that was something I hadn’t experienced before,” she said.

An internship in the summer before her senior year at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art — the largest contemporary art museum in the United States — reinforced the complementary relationship between economics and art. One of her duties was grant writing, an area where she said she was really able to engage both majors.

Service as an apprentice French teacher since her first year in the Kenyon Intensive Language Model prepared her for job interviews. “It taught me how to communicate and present myself in a professional manner,” she said.

A painter and designer, Janzow hopes to someday apply her business experience to the art world.  “Art will always be part of my life and identity, whether I am in the studio or in the corporate business sector,” she said. “I feel lucky to have experience in both disciplines.”