The Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship is a competitive academic grant made each year to fifteen undergraduates nominated by 10 affiliated New York City colleges which provides successive summer internships for three years, stipends, mentoring, and seminars. The fellowship is a program of the Thomas J. Watson Foundation, named after the wife of IBM founder Thomas J. Watson. Jeanette K. Watson Fellows intern at not-for-profit organizations, governmental agencies, and for-profit organization in New York in their first two Watson summers. In their third summer, they typically intern in overseas offices of such organizations as the Institute of International Education, Save the Children, the International Planned Parenthood Federation, as well as community based organizations in such countries as India, South Africa, and Ghana.
The Jeannette K. Watson Fellowship is associated with six divisions of the City University of New York -- Lehman College, Hunter College, the City College of New York, Queens College, Brooklyn College, and the College of Staten Island. It is also affiliated with four independent colleges -- Marymount Manhattan College; Pace University Manhattan; Long Island University, Brooklyn Campus; and the College of Mount Saint Vincent. The Fellowship was established by the Thomas J. Watson Foundation in 1999. It was shaped by its founding Director, the late Alice Stone Ilchman, former President of Sarah Lawrence College who was succeeded as Director in 2006 by Frank Wolf, Dean of the School of Continuing Education Emeritus at Columbia University.