Find a Role Model

Dr. Chung recommended me to interview Sydney Penn for this assignment.

Sydney is a first year graduate student and she will graduate in Fall 2018. She is currently an MBA student concentrating in Project Management. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Interior Architecture from Chatham in the Spring of 2017. Since then she has been working as a graduate assistant in the Business and Entrepreneurship department for the 2017-2018 school year, and she also mentors incoming students that are a part of R.I.S.E mentoring group at Chatham. Sydney played basketball until she tor her meniscus at age 14, resulting in her having to get surgery at age 15. She also enjoys being outside on hot, summer days.

Some advice that Sydney told me about on good studying strategies are as follows. She found that she learns material better when she asks questions or if she applies the problem to real-life situations.  She also would find people that we particularly good at the material she was learning and would ask them to walk her through the materials. Having a dialogue about topics made things stick to her memory better and helped her have a greater understanding of what she was learning. She says “ school can become a big game of memorizing, but if you avoid that and actually learn the material, everything may make a little more sense in the long run.”

To find jobs on-campus or off-campus, the career development center is the place that Sydney suggests to go. At the office, they are able to connect you to people and they know about open positions as well. She also suggests going for jobs/internships that match up with what you plan on doing for your career. She says that many jobs can prepare you for your dream job because “all might require different skills, but making sure you can make sense of your job selections on paper is crucial”. She recommends going to mixers and other networking events hosted by Chatham and other nearby places, which are usually discounted for students or free. By doing this you have an opportunity to get hired or lead to an internship. She said that once she determined what she disliked about a company she based her future internships off of those factors, this way she never did the same internship or went to the same company twice. Doing this will help you gain more experience because not all companies function the same. She also recommends getting involved in as many competitions and projects on campus as possible, many of them will apply the education to real life situations. She says “people tend to get recognized for their accomplishments by taking part in projects and competitions”, Projects and competitions also look good on resumes especially when not all college students are able to have a job.

When I asked Sydney “what made you choose your major and why?”, she responded by saying, “In order to graduate, I had to fulfill an internship requirement. It was then that I decided that I wanted to go to graduate school for my MBA. Being that interior architecture is all project based, I believed concentrating in project management would better suit me. I found myself at one of my internships more engaged in the business aspects of the job. When dealing with projects, it is essential that you understand some of the business terminology and reasoning behind decision making. I hope to eventually marry the two degrees together. If I don’t, I won’t have any regrets about my decision of continuing on to graduate school.”

The last question/topic we focused on was a time where she failed and what she did to fix/overcome it. She talked about the time she failed at receiving her sought over grades her freshman year. She was very focused on receiving a 4.0 GPA in college and didn’t get close to getting a 4.0 until her junior year. She was able to overcome not receiving a 4.0 during undergraduate by looking at what she accomplished. She took 21 credits in one semester and managed to keep a 3.7 GPA and she was the first college graduate in her immediate family and graduated with a 3.5 GPA as well.

I compared my interview with Sydney to an article I found on Chatham’s Business Insight page called, “Internship Spotlight: Anh Nguyen, BA Marketing and Economics ‘19”. This article talks about an undergraduate student, Anh and how she had the chance to intern with a nonprofit organization that focuses on advancing equity and excellence in Pittsburgh Public Schools called A+ Schools. Her role was to “inform and engage the public to mobilize support”. Sydney mentioned internships and how they will expand your knowledge and horizons, for Anh “she leveraged multiple communication channels, such as social media outlets, email newsletters, blog posts, and flyers. The internship presented rich insights on career opportunities and member functions, particularly the role of marketing in a nonprofit organization.”. This internship helped her learn things that she never knew about before, she learned the similarities and differences between non-profit and for-profit organizations. Somethings similar between Anh and Sydney is the fact that they both reply very much on asking questions to learn everything to their fullest ability.