IEDA’s program helps Iowa’s college freshman and sophomores land internships in the state’s ultra-competitive insurance industry.
Jack Upton wasn’t prepared for how competitive insurance internships would be — and he wasn’t alone. As a sophomore at Drake University majoring in actuarial science, he felt stuck when he saw internship listings that required prior experience and often other exams or certifications. It’s an early-career oxymoron that many find themselves facing: How can you need prior experience to get a job that’s supposed to essentially be your first experience?
Upton spent his first summer after freshman year working a summer retail job and was hoping to avoid repeating it. Then he kept seeing these words in internship listings: “Insure Your Future.”
“I had spent months looking into internships, and [found] nothing,” he says. “When I kept seeing Insure Your Future, I had to look into what it is.”
It turns out, it’s a program designed to help students just like Jack — freshmen and sophomores hoping to break into Iowa’s competitive insurance industry — who often found themselves up against upperclassmen with previous experience and advanced credentials.
How Insure Your Future Helps Students Like Jack
Insure Your Future is the brainchild of Michael Gould, business development manager at the Iowa Economic Development Authority. Iowa is home to some 80 insurance companies and ranks first in the nation for insurance as a percentage of GDP. Yet when networking with insurance executives as part of his job, Gould consistently heard that companies had a tough time attracting and retaining talent. Too often, students left the state after graduating.
Gould saw an opportunity: if he could work with colleges and universities to identify qualified freshmen and sophomores, they’d get earlier exposure to the industry and all it has to offer in Iowa and could fill that talent pipeline.
Insure Your Future launched in the spring of 2022 with 30 insurance companies offering 150 internships to freshmen and sophomores at schools like Drake and Iowa State University. Upton, who joined the next year as a sophomore, landed an internship with Continental Western Group.
“I pulled back [focusing] on getting only an actuarial internship. I realized that with an underwriting internship, I was using all the math that actuaries provide,” Upton says. “The work is adjacent, and I’m learning the industry along the way. Insure Your Future created an avenue for getting opportunities like this.”
Students in the program are paid double the minimum wage, and are required to attend four mandatory leadership sessions that help them network with company representatives, visit insurance company campuses, and educate them about the scope of the industry overall.
In turn, students return to school after the summer and act as ambassadors, helping spread the word about their experiences and how the program benefitted them. “I got opportunities I never would have had if I gotten into the industry later on,” Upton says. “It’s because I got an early foothold and branched out from there.”
After his first internship with Continental Western Group, he went back to school and got involved with Drake’s Insurance Innovation Lab working with Insurtech companies. The next year, he was an actuarial intern with Global Atlantic and before he graduated in 2025, he accepted an offer with the company as an actuarial analyst.
Originally from Houston, he’s happily living in downtown Des Moines with no plans to go anywhere. “There’s so much opportunity, especially in my field, that to leave would be giving up too much,” he says. “The advantages of going somewhere else don’t outweigh staying in Iowa, where the industry is so strong—especially the relationships between the colleges and major companies.”
