New Career Exploration Trips Give Students a Broad View of Career Paths

When Kendall Blincoe ’24 came to Syracuse University’s Martin J. Whitman School of Management, she didn’t know what business analytics was. Now, business analytics – one of the newest undergraduate majors at Whitman – is Blincoe’s major. 

This March, Blincoe and other participants in the new Business Analytics in the Big Apple career exploration trip got a glimpse into the wide array of careers available in the relatively new and growing field. 

Along with the business analytics trip, Whitman also offered The Whitman Sampler, which includes examples of jobs available in the fields of every Whitman undergraduate major, for the first time during the March trip.

The 2022-23 academic calendar has been a banner year for Whitman’s popular career exploration trips, which provide undergraduate students a three- or four-day schedule of excursions to various businesses, mainly in New York City, to interact with employees at all levels and learn more about career paths. This academic year, for the first time, every undergrad major has at least some programming available during the trips.

Business analytics trip highlights large and growing field

According to Undergraduate Career Advisor Emily Shaughnessy, the Whitman business analytics program has seen steady increases in enrollment since the major was first offered a few years ago.

“Data is everywhere right now,” says Shaughnessy. In building the schedule for the career exploration trip, she notes, “the plan was to go to a variety of different companies to see how analytics can really fit in anywhere you go with it. Whether it's in marketing, in sales and advertising or finance, wherever we went was really trying to see how that analytics piece tied in, to show the vast range of where you can go and what you can do with it.”

The business analytics group visited companies as varied as asset management firm Apollo Global Management and publisher Scholastic, as well as other well-known names like LinkedIn, Bloomberg and Google. In addition to the company visits, a panel organized around the theme of “Analytics in Food” illustrated that analytics considerations can arise in unexpected places.

“The whole point is to have students be able to explore the career that they're going into and know from A to Z what they could be doing with it,” remarks Shaughnessy.

Second-year student Blincoe says she particularly enjoyed the Scholastic visit because it is the type of company where she would like to work: a mission-driven business that uses analytics to pursue its broader purpose of promoting children’s literacy.

Blincoe recalls her interactions with Syracuse alumni at Scholastic, including Zach Goldberg ’15 (A&S/MAX), who didn’t have the business analytics major available when they were students. She says employees now working in analytics told the career exploration group how they had pivoted into those roles as the field developed. The alumni expressed excitement that Whitman students are now able to learn business analytics concepts before they enter the workforce. 

Career sampler covers all Whitman majors

A virtual half-day version of the career sampler was first offered during the 2021-22 school year. For the new in-person trip in the spring of 2023, students spent three days in New York City visiting with individuals in roles representing all nine Whitman undergraduate majors. The group visited six companies, including marketing agency VMLY&R, accounting and advising firm RSM, LinkedIn, Prosper Property Group, fashion holding company Tapestry, and Unilever.

Unlike the other trips that are based around specific career paths, The Whitman Sampler caters to first- and second-year students who are undecided or have multiple interests. “Sophomore year is so important because the students commit to a major sophomore year,” notes Alicin Welsh, associate director of the Whitman Career Center. “Narrowing it down gives them a sense of comfort and this trip really helps them with that.”

Jordan Ferguson ’25 is one of those students who has a variety of interests. He is an accounting major who wants to work in a large accounting firm after graduation. But he’s also taking a long view of possible career paths. 

“A lot of the people that we're speaking with, they're doing something totally different than what they studied in college,” he remarks. “I want to do accounting after graduation, but something else might pull me in a different direction. So being able to be flexible and be able to pivot is something the alumni made sure that we left with.” 

On the final day of the trip, students on both tracks spent a half day with alumni at work. This was the first time since before the pandemic that students had the opportunity to shadow alumni. Each alum paired with one to three students for everything from a walk from the students’ hotel to the office to team meetings. 

Ferguson spent the morning with a group of students and alumni at Synchrony Bank. “That was the highlight of my experience. I was actually able to act like I was working in New York City,” says the Florida native. “So that was very insightful. My biggest takeaway was to be able to understand that living in the city is something I could really do.”

For students like Blincoe entering an emerging field or students like Ferguson who have a range of interests, the new trips provided a valuable chance to connect the dots between their on-campus learning and future careers.  And, as Shaughnessy says, “You can’t teach that in a classroom.”