Meet the Interns: Carmen Keller

Prairie State Generating Company is excited to welcome Carmen Keller as a legal intern for the summer of 2017.

Keller, who is a native of Nashville, Illinois, is a second year law student at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale where she focuses on corporate legal and family law. Prior to law school, Keller graduated from SIU in December of 2015 with her bachelor’s degree in communications studies and a minor in English.

“Having a legal internship at Prairie State is going to help me learn how legal practices work outside of the classroom,” Keller said. “I know in a lot of law school programs they throw a lot of things at you just to see what you can handle, but once you get into practicing law, it’s very different from what you learned in school. This internship will show me the difference between what they tell you in school and what happens when you’re working in a corporate environment.”

Keller said she likes the idea of working in legal for a corporation because it provides a more focused work experience; she would be able to focus on the company’s goals and needs within its specific field. This is different from working in a private practice where the day’s workload can vary on a case-to-case basis.

Keller is an outsider to the power generation industry, but she said that she has a new found respect for it thanks to her brief time at Prairie State.

While law school is an extremely time consuming task, Keller does her best to make time for herself. She enjoys working out and hiking; she just recently returned from a vacation at Glacier National Park in Montana where she spent much of the trip hiking.

Following the completion of her internship at Prairie State, Keller will return to SIU to finish out the final two years of her law degree. She plans to stay in southern Illinois after graduation to work in corporate or family law.