Open House: Prepare For Success - Business Program

well good evening everyone my name is tom mchugh and i'm one of the assistant directors of admission at college of the holy cross i'm just here to offer a brief introduction and to go over some housekeeping items and then i'll be waiting in the wings to collect some questions towards the end just want to remind everyone that there is closed captioning available if you are interested in using that and then we also have a q a feature so please feel free as the presentation and session is going along to submit your questions and we'll do our best to get to those at the end but without further ado i'll turn it over to my colleagues in the pre-business program holy cross and we hope that you enjoy the session hi everybody uh welcome to our session uh talking about the business program with that we offer here at holy cross uh i am professor david chu i've been a professor at holy cross for a long long time i'm currently director of certificate programs and pre-business advisors at the chioka center for business ethics and society this is the center from which we offer our entire spectrum of business programs for students who are preparing for a career in business with me are two of our colleagues cassie jeevery i'll let cassie introduce herself hi everyone i'm cassie jeevery is the associate director of this yoga center and we have a student here with us as well hi guys my name is nick bettenhauser i'm currently a freshman and i'll be talking about like my experience with the chioka center so cassie if you could put up the slides for our presentation they'll be great so the uh business program is offered primarily through the shioka center for business ethics and society our job is to help prepare students who are interested and who are preparing to get a job in the business world in the various different functional areas and and industry specializations in business we do not offer a major academic major in business we do not have a business department a business major or business school so you're wondering why come to holy cross if you're interested in preparing for a business career so our tagline as you can see in this slide is major in anything and succeed in business next slide please so uh with the agenda uh we're going to go over uh a an overview uh nick is going to talk about his experience and then we'll answer any questions you may have next slide in the chioka center for business ethics and society in addition to our tagline of major in anything succeed in business what we really want to do doing that is to connect your liberal arts education to the marketplace if you look at the slide there's a purple uh circle with uh four stick figures in it three of them are white the other ones are uh darkened this is to highlight that three out of four of our active holy cross alumni are currently working in business roles either in a for-profit business or a not-for-profit business this is taken from a database comprising of starting with the class of 1979 all the way through to 2019. so we talked about 40 years of graduate classes about about 28 000 students 38 000 alumni so three quarters of them 75 which is about 21 000 are currently working in business roles and yet we uh do not offer a major so none of them majored in business while they were here so you're wondering what is the what's the magic trick well the name of the game with business companies where they hire people straight out of college it's not about what they studied what they majored it's really about skills and experience so the first point here is that for holy cross students interested in preparing for business the key thing is skills and experience holy cross students must exhibit that they have the requisite skills and a fundamental level of literacy and experience to get started with a company that's why we say you can major in anything because what you major in is an academic interest it is not really of relevance to businesses businesses are really interested in hiring students who are intelligent and you've been accepted to holy cross you are intelligent we want to they want to hire students who are hard-working but on top of that they also want students who have some skills and experience so that they can get started on the job hit the ground running and succeed in their in the in their jobs so what we offer at this yoga center are a number of certificate programs that train you in business skills and experiential learning as well as connect you to you to the alumni network that is out there that's 21 000 holy cross alumni who are actively engaged in business at this point next slide please so what are these business certificate programs well these programs are not a major or a minor or a concentration that is for academic credit these certificates provide you with a comprehensive and structured program so that you can acquire some technical business skills a very basic level of business skills and experiences that goes parallel with your liberal arts education so you're doing the certificate programs in addition to whatever courses you're taking for your major they are they're offered alongside your liberal arts education we offer three business certificate programs first one is business fundamentals second one is certificate entrepreneurship and the third one is a certificate in finance and banking generally all three of these certificates require a common set of markers that students need to complete in order to earn the certificate they need to do a number of alumni led industry specific workshops and i'll go into these details of what kind of workshops in the next slide i want to emphasize that these are alumni led meaning that these workshops are taught by alumni who are currently active in their respective fields so for example in business fundamentals we require the students to do a workshop in marketing communications and sales so the alumni who are teaching these workshops are themselves practitioners in marketing advertising branding communications uh and sales and so you will be getting taught by people who are experienced and actually practicing what they're teaching in the field this is not theory this is specific hands-on skills that you'll be learning a second requirement is that you you complete three modules in an advanced excel tutorial excel is a very important skill to know and employers are expecting students to have some basic understanding of spreadsheets because spreadsheets are used widely in business analysis so these tutorials will provide students with some basic levels of understanding and skills and orientation towards using spreadsheets we also require three courses from a list of recommended courses that we put on our website these are all bonafide holy cross courses and we just require that a student take three out of the list you will need to take 32 courses and pass them to graduate from holy cross i'm sure you can find three that will fit the list the fourth requirement and fifth requirement are the experience component of the program we require that you do an internship we offer a great selection of business internships through our center for career development i'm sure you may have gone to their presentation if they have not already presented the summer internships are usually paid they're usually offered in the summer after your junior year they are entire summer 10 weeks long you get a lot of mentoring and experience in those internships and we require that you do at least one internship we encourage you to do more but one would be sufficient for the certificate program and the last requirement is that you do a job shadowing job shadowing is very simple you sign up for again at the center for career development they will connect you with an alumni in the field of your interest so for example if you're interested in banking then you will sign up for job shadowing with a banker in new york boston wherever you are and you show up at the person's place of work and you follow them around for half a day or day and then you get a feel for what a typical work day in banking is like at the end of the day the the alumni will sit down with you debrief explain answer any questions you may have this is to expose you to the work environment of the outside world through a connection with an alum so again the last two requirement internship and job shadowing are designed to provide you with some experiences in the business world that you can talk about at your interview when you actually go for a job okay so those are the three certificates and the general requirements for each of these certificates now i'm going to go into each certificate in a little bit more detail so i'm going to first go to business fundamentals the certificate of business fundamentals is for students who are unsure about what they want to specialize in in business they just want to gain a general knowledge of business to get started and they're open to different kinds of career placements but they don't know specifically what kind so in addition to the tutorial the internship courses and job shadowing requirements here are the five workshops that students need to do in order to fulfill this requirement you can see that two the first two are in bold and the last three are not that's because the last three are common workshop requirements for all three certificates so i'll go over those three first and i'll talk about the other two all three certificates will require that you do the full bridge professional edge workshop which is our equivalent of an introduction to business workshop all all the certificate students are required to fulfill a business ethics and principal leadership workshop it's basically a half day workshop held on on saturday and then the last one is an interview prep we all need to prepare ourselves for what really goes on in an interview how to get it interview what to do during an interview what questions they ask at an interview these are all general workshops that are important to any student in any field for students that are just interested in business fundamentals the first two workshops in bold are what we asked students to complete the first one is the global supply chain management and this is offered during fall break incidentally all these workshops are offered during break fall break winter break spring break and also on saturdays this this is to ensure that none of these workshops are going to conflict with your classes so the global supply chain management is a workshop offered during fall break this introduces a student to the world of supply chain covet and the recent suez canal incident has really highlighted the importance of supply chain management and uh the second workshop is marketing communications and sales every student need to understand a little bit about branding marketing advertising uh pr communications and also sales so these workshops are all taught by business professionals most of whom are alumni in their fields okay so this is a certificate in business fundamentals the next one is a certificate in entrepreneurship entrepreneurship is something that everyone can learn a little bit about not everybody wants to be one suppose you don't want to work for somebody and someday want to be your own boss want to start something new maybe you're a creative kind of person that thinks outside the box and a nine-to-five job is just so boring so you really want to do your own thing learning the principles of entrepreneurship not necessarily that you become the next steve jobs or bill gates or zuckerberg or or google people but just to understand this and how this works there's a process to it it's important so the certificate in entrepreneurship is going to require again excel internship courses and job shadowing but then you are just required to do uh several workshops and again the last three are the same i won't talk about it anymore i want to highlight just the first two first two is at least one semester of a student-run incubator we have an incubator that is managed by students and coordinated by uh we have a full-time entrepreneur in residence who works for us she teaches an entrepreneurship course she runs the entrepreneurship and innovation program here at holy cross there's a lot more about it i just want to highlight the certificate and she also supervises the certificate so i just want to highlight the certificate at this point she supervises the student run incubator that meets weekly bi-weekly depending on how how they organized they are made up of a group of students who have ideas they learn how to polish their ideas and scrub these ideas into minimum value propositions and then how to learn how to convert these ideas into a workable business plan that's what the student run incubator is uh is designed to do uh they are offered year round so this still run incubator which we call hc launch is available to students both semesters of the year so fall semester spring semester and so on we're requiring that students for this certificate do at least one semester of a student-run incubator now trueblue entrepreneur will be there camping out and living in the incubator room all their lives because they just love it right but most of them will go more than one semester of course but we were we're just asking them to do at least one semester uh second requirement is what's called a startup week we typically run a an immersion uh in boston and cambridge this is the in our backyard where a lot of cool incubators and startups are located uh in case you don't know moderna the the current uh one of the current colbit vaccines is it was designed by a cambridge company and so uh there we go it's right in our backyard right so they participate in a startup week where they go to boston they meet with holy cross alumni who are entrepreneurs doing cool things in boston in cambridge okay so though that's the gist of the certificate in entrepreneurship the last certificate is a certificate in finance and banking again you can see that the workshops that they're required to do are differentiated and specialized according to this particular area so the first one we call corporate finance and banking and asset management this is held in boston so when we go back to in person we should be able to go to boston take the students to boston they uh meet with bankers and uh finance alumni who will teach them about finance and banking from the corporate angle and then network with alumni that night stay overnight in boston and then the next day visit asset management companies a couple of spring breaks ago when we were still meeting in person we spent the morning at wellington and then the afternoon at net texas those are two huge global asset management investment management companies in in boston and we have a good group of alumni there to host us the second workshop is in new york city we call this a finance boot camp it's a pretty intensive four-day workshop that's held during fall break we go we start with an overview of wall street how is it structured by side versus sell side careers and all the various sub specialties within wall street this is taught by alumni in banks in boston this is held on campus so this is like more like a classroom kind of thing but with a lot of small group activities hands-on presentations and so on and then the day three we get on a chartered bus early in the morning we arrive in new york city around noon time and we start the day uh visiting with our alumni in new york at the at the big bulge bracket banks so for example we will start with goldman sachs then move on to barclays then jp morgan private bank jp morgan sales and trading then we we visited uh uh we network at morgan stanley and then we also go to ubs uh credit suisse all kinds of uh bank of america or wherever we have alumni who wants to host us so that's how we expose you to getting the skills and experience understanding the industry in in the finance and banking okay so those are the in summary three certificates that we offer through the chioka center again the purpose is designed to give you a basic minimum level of literacy in business as well as the skills and experience that you can talk about when you are at an interview okay so now in addition to the certificates the next slide shows us a little bit of the student-run business clubs that we also sponsor you can see that we sponsor quite a few of these clubs these clubs are all run by students the it is designed to expose you to current events active discussions and also these clubs will arrange for alumni to speak to us uh in their different fields through either zoom or if they're if they can come to campus in person so the agency is essentially our marketing and advertising club consult your community is a chapter of a national organization and the students is the student running this is interested in learning about consulting jobs the consulting field the consulting career right after holy cross everyone thinks consulting is cool but nobody knows what consultants we do so this consulting community talks about opens up the lid to understanding what consultants do and also connects students forms them in teams and finds local consulting opportunities with businesses in the worcester area small businesses mostly to get them to get the students started and do a win-win situation where they can learn something about consulting and they can also help the small business achieve certain objectives through the consulting the finance club is interested in helping students understand careers in finance where the jobs are and how to prepare to get them hc launch as i described earlier is a student-run incubator for students with ideas and wants to turn them into businesses this is the incubator part of the club we also have a real estate club to help students understand and network with alumni in commercial primarily in commercial real estate it's not really about selling a residential property it's really about commercial real estate in new york in boston and so on the student investment fund is a a group of very organized and motivated we call them hardcore asset management students so they're really interested in managing an investment portfolio and so they're not just interested in jobs in finance and how to prepare for them so this is a more focused group compared to the finance club they are organized like an asset management company so uh the senior students will be asset managers and they have they interview freshmen who try to try to get a job as a starting analyst and they actually access bloomberg we have a bloomberg terminal in our library we also subscribe to the cap iq standard of course capital iq databases which allow students to get online and do some analysis so these students are actually doing analysis on companies presenting their companies and their recommendations buy sell hold and so on uh sales group is interest is for students interested in sales again sales isn't your knock on the door and try to get in and sell a vacuum cleaner kind of thing we're talking about sales business to business sales business to consumer sales at a large at a higher level and lastly but not least we have a group of women who are interested in business they form a club and network we actually have a huge conference every november on campus for it's called the holy cross women in business conference we feature uh keynotes who are from alumnae from uh prominent positions one year we had a senior vice president of marriott and we are also looking forward to getting somebody in who's running uh that is the chief operating officer of jetblue to to kind of to speak to us this is for women to to network uh who are interested in business okay so with this i'm going to hand it over to nick because nick as a freshman has been very active in our program and i'm gonna let nick talk a little bit about his experience there all right thanks um so my name is nick benhauser i'm from sudbury massachusetts um and as uh professor chu was saying i'm already um at holy cross i'm in a dorm right now we're on lockdown so not too fun um but i'm intending to pursue a major in international studies and my chi my experience with the chioka center has been a great one so being a freshman first semester was definitely difficult to connect with the community so i as well as some other freshmen decide just to take the initiative and engage with the chioka center so coming into freshman year the only experience i had with business was my sales job selling cutco knives this past summer i guarantee some of you have heard about that um and i've had some success with it so it kind of prompted me to explore the business world a little bit more so when i saw that the sales club had no chair i decided to go ahead and run with it and since then we've had a lot of success with it we've had alumni speakers from thompson reuters pepsico oracle and they've come to talk to us about the aspect of sales and how it applies to their specific industry and we've also used it as an opportunity to network and some students have actually secured internships due in part to our events and upcoming we have alumni from cintas and putnam investments and in addition to my club leadership experience um sorry just lost my place for a second so i engaged with the business certificate program as well where i'm pursuing a certificate in business fundamentals and during the j term i attended all the workshops alongside one of my friends sasha and we engaged in programs like full bridge global supply chain marcom which is the marketing communication and sales as well as interview prep and my favorite out of those was definitely full bridge and just because we started learning the ins and out of the business world including like calculations and definitions um but the best part was when we were assigned a company and a group uh where to like research the company find a problem and then propose a solution so my group was assigned diadera and if you haven't heard about that it's a small italian sportswear company little known to the world and being a small company it was kind of hard to find the financial information needed to assess diadera um but we eventually we worked hard and it turned into into some great results and we had a really cool presentation where we came up with like a new type of shoe um and we were all official dressed up it was really fun it kind of felt like a virtual shark tank and most recently my friend sasha paradise and i we won the innovation challenge and that asked students to find a better way to connect more efficiently during covet 19 on campus so sasha and i were definitely motivated by the cash prize but we also wanted to bring some a fun event to our class so we came up with an idea called fresh fest so we spent numerous hours planning and designing our event to show how fresh fest could be coveted safe but also be a fun time for freshmen to connect before leaving in may so the day that we have planned it we have time slots we're gonna have food trucks um there's gonna be like american style food italian food it's going to be an awesome day and each slot will be different to attract everyone we'll have like trivia competition with um corn hole we're going to do some giveaways as well so just going to wrap up some of you may be thinking how does my major connect to business or sales um so i would just say that business is everywhere and you need to know how to sell yourself or really any idea that you have um and i'd say selling yourself is probably one of the best skills you can learn and that yoga center does a great job helping you learn how to do that yet i cannot recommend holy cross enough and also the joker center great thank you nick uh i want to just uh give a shout out to nick nick is one of the rare freshmen who took advantage of covet to finish all our online workshops he's in business fundamentals and he did uh he's finished all the workshops uh in this freshman year because of cobit we had to focus and concentrate all the workshops in the month of january and it was all done online and nick was able to finish them all so i have no doubt that that nick is going to succeed in business regardless of his major so let's go to the wrap up slide and i just want to show you uh just a little a little very small sample of the students over the years where they are what they majored in so you can see we have psych major math poli-sci studio art english art history sociology and french chinese chemistry and they're all working in business they are business development the brand manager food and beverage media specialist senior talent associate account executives e-commerce sales cross-asset trader goldman and an associate at boston healthcare associates so you can see that it doesn't matter what students have majored at holy cross what matters is who they are and the skills and experience that they can present at the interview that is why three out of four of our alumni are currently working in business roles over the last 40 years of graduation classes okay so that's the the last slide is again to reiterate uh check us out our home page where we list all the details of our programs can be found at holycross.edu business again the three major points i want to get across is skills and experience is the name of the game major in anything and succeed in business as long as you can acquire skills and experience and articulate that at the interview and we don't offer majors or minors or or concentrations we offer certificate programs that are specifically designed to offer you the skills and the experiential learning and we have a great alumni network as well okay so at this point we're open for any questions you may have well tom from admissions is back um we've been queuing up some questions along the way and one question that came up a couple of times was just have students done multiple certificate programs at holy cross or is it most common for students just to focus on one certificate uh there are students who double double certificate so to speak and we allow that so for example this graduating class of 2021 we have a number of students who are graduating with two certificates because as you can see there are a lot of the requirements overlap and they just have to vary and uh so yes we have students who have done multiple certificates and that's that's that's fine we we love that there's other questions just about um our business program nationally and internationally one question just about study abroad opportunities that like the business program i don't know if you could speak to that david uh we don't have any connections with uh international business schools or uh international employees our this chioka center's main purpose is education it's workshop education the center for career development their job is to connect the students to jobs and so a lot depends on what the student's interest is maybe to say a little bit about that the most important thing employees are looking for an entry-level employee is does that person have the skills and experience and the and the capability of learning on the job can they trade are you trainable are you able to pick up our system and run with it they're not going to assign a an entry-level person to china or to the middle east or to europe immediately that's just not going to happen right every entry-level analyst has got to learn the basic things about the company and prove their worth to the company at the very at the very generic level before company will will start to think okay down the road if there's an opening somewhere outside of this country who do we send uh that's when they start thinking about okay perhaps you know maybe we'll send well they'll send the best person that's suitable for the job so internationally i would say don't worry about the international side for now just focus on fundamental competence then how about students going on to graduate school to get an mba how popular is that amongst holy cross grads either right after leaving no not not popular and we don't encourage that what we don't think that just getting an mba straight out of college is worth the extra money we believe very firmly that our alumni network our workshops the holy cross education the holy cross is holistic education those things combined should be sufficient what the students need is to be able to connect those things together connecting the liberal arts education to the marketplace by this program so that they can our program is like a bridge program would bridge their holy cross education to the marketplace uh they should be able to get started the the best mba programs uh don't take students straight out of college anyway and we don't recommend a student to take a third tier second tier mba program just to have an mba so we encourage them to work get the work experience and if down the road they they think that they need an mba to continue on their careers then they should aim for the top mba programs and then get there just a couple more questions just in terms of the strength of our alumni network there was just a question about what makes our alumni network so strong i don't know if you could speak to that our alumni network is very very strong our alumni are fanatically loyal to holy cross they bleed purple as we say and uh years ago that's why our workshops are all taught by alumni practically all taught by alumni and these are alumni that are teaching for our program voluntarily they are lining up wanting to help i have not had to pay i've been doing this program for 15 years i've not had to pay any of them other than to reimburse them for their travel sometimes but they have not not a single one of them has really asked to be paid to do the job in fact given their seniority in the company if they ask for you to pay them uh at the market rate i would go broke i won't be able to afford them uh they are all doing this because they love holy cross and they want to give back our alumni work network is very strong uh years ago when i ran a summer program we used to we used to have have it open to non-holy cross students who are interested and we had a student from yale do a three-week program with us and this in those three weeks we were able to get 30 plus alumni to come in during these three weeks to either be a dinner speaker or teach a session or mentor as a team executive and so on after the meeting uh she said to me i am so impressed by the commitment of the holy cross alumni and the last thing she said to me is stuck with me forever she said you will never see that at yale and at that time she was a i think a sophomore or a junior at yale she was a psych major and she said young alumni don't do this for their school so that says a lot the last couple of questions i can feel just in terms of the competitiveness of the business clubs um they're come one come all there's no uh competition as far as i know in terms of our clubs and organizations at holy cross i'll let cassie and nick address that uh well i can speak for sales club um everyone that applies obviously like i'm we're also freshmen so our thing was when we took it we're coming in it with little experience so we want to bring in as many people as we can and kind of have the alumni um teach us and kind of educate us on these things i can't speak to any of the other clubs but i also know if you're applying to be like in a as a leadership role i think that is something that would be a little bit more like restrictive i would say so i help or help the students kind of organize that leadership role typically there's at least two or three students who are leading the charge they're you know succession planning so maybe a couple seniors and a junior a lot of them have e-boards so someone managing the email account or social media um maybe there's a few events with alumni so they're taking turns kind of reaching out and organizing those um but as far as attendance goes the more the barrier right we don't want to limit the number of students who can um give themselves right a network of their peers who are eventually going to be their alumni network in the industry that they're interested in and so please join up then the last major question was just about study abroad programs once again and i'll just say anecdotally i do know holy cross students that have studied abroad and gotten internships while they're abroad across focuses a lot on long-term study abroad programs through consecutive semesters and there's some programs like one in china that students do a semester in beijing and one of those is uh very internship oriented then there's our domestic dc and new york city programs that revolve around internships for an entire semester so while not necessarily under the umbrella of the the business team at holy cross mourn the study abroad and jd power center in turns very much tied to study abroad experiences and encouraged as well so i think we'll put a cap on it there um i appreciate the the time of all the admitted students who came to attend tonight's event we hope that you'll stay in touch with us i'm just going to drop my email in the chat as a representative of the admission office and any of the other panelists who feel moved to do so can do the same but we hope that you'll stay in touch with us and that you enjoy the rest of your sunday evening and that you finish your senior year strong great uh so if you have any questions please direct them to tom who has the contact information and then tom will forward your questions to us and we'll will then respond to you directly all right thanks everyone have a good evening good to see all the panelists here thank you bye

2021-04-20 19:01

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