One of the statistics that colleges and universities pride themselves on is post-graduation job and graduate school placements. One avenue straight out of school that many recent Wabash graduates have turned to, and have had much luck with, is the Orr Fellowship.
Founded in 2001, the Orr Fellowship is a two-year postgraduate experience that connects promising young professionals from the state of Indiana with emerging businesses in Indianapolis and Evansville. Orr Fellowship places fellows within their partner businesses and organizes skill development and networking opportunities for them over the next two years. The goal of the Fellowship is to retain young, talented professionals in Indiana and leverage their skills to help innovative businesses grow. The interconnectedness of the program is one of its major strengths in Steven Emch’s opinion, the president of Orr Fellowship.
“We’re finding the best businesses we can find, and we want all those leaders to know each other,” said Emch. “Similarly, for the fellows and the students that ultimately become a part of the program, we want them all to know each other and be connected to our alumni. You get this thriving, connected ecosystem of highly assessed people who have separated themselves early, who want to go on and make something of themselves in this community, who we hope great things can come out of.”
It’s an environment that continues to bear fruit for Wabash alumni. In the last five years alone, the College has produced 22 Orr Fellows. Seven come from the class of 2025, and have already accepted job offers from the businesses they were placed with. Those seven make up nearly 10 percent of the Orr Fellowship’s 80-person 2025 cohort, a sizable percentage for a school with around 860 students, and tied with Butler University for the most students from one school that isn’t named Purdue University or Indiana University. For Nick Logan ’24, an Orr Fellow in the 2024 cohort, part of the reason why Wabash students have had great success with Orr Fellowship is the widely-applicable skills they gain while in Crawfordsville.
“My job right now has absolutely nothing to do with my major, but everything to do with the skills that I developed at Wabash throughout my four years,” said Logan. “I work in preconstruction at an affordable housing developer, but I majored in economics. Preconstruction involves project engineering and project management, which I’d never done. I don’t know if there’s even any classes about that at Wabash. But Wabash, it builds the skills that you need to adapt and grow and develop. It’s all about how you apply them.”
Logan, a preconstruction coordinator with The Annex Group in Indianapolis, recently stepped into a further role with the Orr Fellowship as a member of their Fellowship Leadership Team. Each year the cohort of Orr Fellows in their second year of the program nominate and elect eight representatives who will comprise the Fellowship Leadership Team, taking on director roles in areas like marketing, recruitment and community engagement.
Logan was elected to serve as the Orr Fellowship’s Director of Finance, the seventh Wabash alumnus in a row to fill the role. In his role, Logan will work closely with the Fellowship’s executive team and will oversee all Fellow and Fellowship Leadership Team budgetary action. Logan’s recent win, and the wins of other Wabash men who have held roles on the Leadership Team, signals the respect they have among their peers.
“The fellows choose these positions, which I think is really meaningful for people like Nick and the rest of the crew that got elected this year,” said Emch. “This is them advocating and being seen by their peers as a leader among leaders, which says a lot.”
Logan is appreciative of the amount of responsibility directing the finances of the fellowship program will be on top of the responsibility he holds with his employer, but relishes the chance to work and learn from other young professionals, even more than he would have had he not stepped into the director of finances role. But reflecting on the entirety of his Orr Fellowship experience, his most salient emotion is gratitude.
“I can’t say enough great things about the Orr Fellowship for putting me in the position to interview with my partner company and getting me a spot with them,” said Logan. “All I can say is, ‘I’m really grateful.’ It’s hard to put into words.”