A Little Bit of This and a Little Bit of That

As a recent Hofstra graduate (2017), I remember my senior year constantly feeling the stress when I hear of all of my peers going on job interviews and signing their contracts, and I had NO clue where to start. I was soon going to be holding my BBA in Marketing and had no idea what I wanted to do with it. I went on a bunch of interviews and nothing felt right. 

I ended up landing a position at a small, family-run project management firm in NYC as the Executive Assistant to the CEO. It ended up being the most amazing first job I could have dreamed of. I loved working for a small company because while my title was Executive Assistant, I was handling all of their marketing, which I was able to brag about on my resume. Eventually I got brought into the swing of project management and got promoted to assist with client projects. 

I still felt something was missing. I would work 9-5 and go home and ask myself "now what?". I tried to volunteer locally, looked for local part-time jobs, I needed to fill my extra time because that's how I am! A year after graduating I decided to apply for graduate school, do a complete u-turn in my career path, and got into the Higher Education Leadership & Policy Program here at Hofstra. 

SURPRISE! I want to work in student affairs because of what Hofstra gave me during my undergraduate years. Hofstra gave me joy and inspiration and being here doesn't feel like a 9-5 to me. The best part about being able to change your career direction is that you can learn how to apply all the various skills you've acquired and apply them in anything you do. I've taken my marketing and customer service skills and applied that to my project management position. I then took my project management skills and applied it to running events throughout campus. All my skills and my passions are brought with me no matter what I do in the end. 

So what I hope you get out of my story is that it is OKAY to change your path and it doesn't matter WHEN you decide to change your path!

Kari Schaefer
Graduate Marketing Assistant
The Career Center

What Strikes a Chord with You?

When I think back to my “beginning,” I think of that quintessential question that we’ve been asked since we were old enough to formulate an answer… “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Me? An astronaut! Then a baseball player. Then a chef. What I never said, though, was “I want to work in External Relations in a university’s Career Center!” That wasn’t exactly top-of-mind for a 5 year old. Nor, was it, for an 18-year-old just starting college – no, at that point in my life, I wanted to be in the music business.

When I started classes, however, I quickly found that though I loved playing music, I didn’t
necessarily love studying it. I had never thought that there could have been a difference; it was always my understanding that if you love doing something, you should love learning about it! It wasn’t until I sat down with an advisor that I started to think less about focusing my studies on my interests and more about figuring out how my interests could complement my studies. When I started to look with this new lens, I saw that I was loving my first semester Psychology class, and I had joined an a cappella singing group to keep music in my life. Fast-forward to my last semester, and I was music director of that a cappella group, and a Psychology major finishing up my capstone research project on how certain genres of music can affect a jury’s evaluation of a case – the perfect meshing of my academic and extra-curricular interests! When I started graduate school here at Hofstra, and ultimately found myself working full-time in The Career Center, I kept arranging music to keep my skills sharp, finding a side-hustle along the way.

College is absolutely a time to try new things, but it’s also a time to think about the ways in which your already established interests can serve you as you move through this important part of your life. You may stay on the same path, go in a completely different direction, or find some way to meld in the middle – what matters is that you took the time to try each path out, reflect on the experience, and decide whether that path suits you.

Amy Smith
Associate Director of External Relations

From College to the Real World

As the liaison to the Hofstra College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, I come across so many amazing students that are doing incredible things. Their stories of where they started to where they are going inspire me every day, and this is why I wake up every morning happy to come to work. One of those students, Rebecca Lo Presti, a graduating senior this upcoming May, who is majoring in history and double minoring in drama and French, recently shared some insight on her career path. She started off as a drama major and now loves working with museums and art. She told me: “I spent the first 19 years of my life thinking that I would go into theater. I am now so far away from those goals that my past self is barely recognizable”.

Rebecca is currently interning with the Nassau Museum of Art and is a Center for Civic Engagement Fellow here at Hofstra. She considered going to graduate school right after her bachelor’s degree, because of the common misconception that if you major in the Liberal Arts you have to get a graduate degree. This is certainly not the case, you can with a liberal arts degree get a job with a bachelor’s degree. Employers seek out liberal arts students because they learn skills in their classrooms that other majors may not, like writing, in depth analysis, and more… It is more about your personal interests and where you want to go with your career, and if your current degree can get you there. Rebecca realized that she didn’t have to go straight into a graduate degree because of where she currently works and the people she has met in her internships. She reflected by saying: “… Over the summer, I interned at the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. This museum houses two of Monet’s haystacks in addition to many other pieces by world-famous artists. The Hill-Stead also hosts a poetry festival in the summer that has welcomed MacArthur Fellows and New York Times bestselling authors. Despite this prestige, my boss did not have anything beyond a bachelor’s degree. She was in charge of both marketing and communications for the Hill-Stead, and she did this all with a BA. Moreover, my current boss at the Nassau County Museum of Art only has her BA, too. Her knowledge about art and museum studies is unparalleled by anyone else that I know, and I value every minute I spend interning for her. Although I will eventually go to graduate school, my bosses at my internships demonstrated that success is not intrinsically tied to one’s level of education.”

Rebecca also reflected that you need to be sure of what you want to go to graduate for and have passion for that degree and field. For her, she knows what she loves and wants to enter the workforce to get a clearer vision of what her graduate degree will be in. She said “As of now, I would like to work with museums and art. This might change, though. I do a lot of community engagement and grassroots activism on campus. These interests could lead to different job opportunities and career paths that I am not even aware of right now. When I go to grad school, I want my degree to be a reflection of where my career is at the moment and where it will be in the future. I simply don’t know what I will do for work. But that’s okay. I am excited to start working. I am excited to see what will happen. I will get to grad school, but for now, I am more than happy to enter the real world.”

So in short, we all have a beginning, but the rest of our stories are in our hands, are we going to get an advance degree, are we going to be a impactful part of the workforce? For Rebecca, she is ok with not knowing, but her undergraduate degree in liberal arts has taught her that what ever will come her way she is prepared for.

Sabeen Sheikh
Assistant Director, Outreach and Special Programs

Rebecca Lo Presti
Senior, History Major