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Testimonials for Business Jobs/Careers: (Return to Previous Page)
Enterprise is searching for
capable college students to fill their staff. Many of the skills sought
after are those you learn in PAF 101: Problem solving, organization, hard work
and attention to detail. In addition you must be a friendly person capable
of handling potentially rude and angry customers. If you have studied and
follow the principles in Dale Carnegie's How to Friends and Influence People
this should be no problem. At Enterprise Rent-A-Car you will be learning and working at an internship that is widely respected in the business world. Most companies know the training and hard work that goes into this internship. You are also paid more than minimum wage and work in a generally friendly environment where employees are more then happy to help you get started. You will also learn how small business works since each branch is treated as a small business with its own manager. [top] Megan Parker '07 - General Electric's Communications Leadership Development Program After graduation in May I will be working in General
Electric's Communications Leadership Development Program at its corporate
headquarters in Connecticut. I can say, without any hesitation, that I got this
job because of my policy studies major. [top] Carrie Kabat '05 - Policy Studies and Public Relations Major Working for a PR Firm It's hard to believe it's been almost a month since graduation, and I have been slow in getting the word out to you, but wanted to let you know that I DID get that Public Relations job I was interviewing for in Boston! I am doing public relations and cause branding for Jockey International (yes, the underwear company!) and also for Barbour, which is a British outerwear company that has used Cone as it's PR arm in the US for 14 years. I love everything I'm doing and the people I work with are wonderful. I feel very lucky to be working for such a great agency, and know I'm going to be learning so much just by being here. [top] Katherine Workman
'05 - Policy Studies [top] Erin Maghran '04 - Working At A Large Insurance Broker, Marsh Inc. Taking PAF 101 as a elective
my freshman year, changed my college education. After only a few classes, I
knew that this major was not the a typical major on campus. Becoming a PAF
major opened up endless opportunities including internships and hands on
projects allowing development, growth and learning both inside and outside the
classroom. Throughout college, I was able to develop my skills and education
around my interests and likes in order to help pursue a career after college.
Nearly a year after graduation, I am working at Marsh, Inc. as a Risk Analyst
and am training to be an insurance broker. While not a typical role for a
policy studies major to end up in, the job involves both qualitative and
quantitative analysis, client interaction and presentation and project
managerial skills all of which I was able to learn and develop during PAF
classes and experiences. [top] Christian Tomas '04 - Newspaper and Policy Studies at World Bank Hey now! If you want to be a teacher, lawyer or journalist, definitely consider the policy studies major. You learn invaluable skills, how to research, write, evaluate and present data the right way. PAF can help you succeed in the aforementioned careers or any field for that matter because the major can teach you skills that every employer wants. Following graduation in May 2004, I landed a job as a consultant and put my PAF skills to great use for the World Bank Institute. There, I designed and copy-edited a training manual for the gender development team. The assignment felt like a real-world version of PAF 410 and I want to thank Carol especially for teaching our class how to use the tracking function in Word because I used it a lot for that job. I would rewrite passive sentences or ask the author to add more context to certain passages that read like a laundry list of obscure numbers. In 2003, I spent a summer with USA Today Sports compiling and analyzing sports statistics for enterprise stories. By recognizing data trends, I could pitch story ideas to my editors. I credit Bill's PAF 315 class for helping me do a good job that summer. Right now, I work for the World Bank Law Resource Center, where I recently designed and put together their internal and external Web sites. Thank you Lisa for helping me build and fine-tune my HTML skills. Definitely take a Web design course because chances are that you'll be in an office or non-profit that needs someone who knows how to create and publish a Web site. Bottom-line, I could not have secured my last two summer jobs, and not been able to do the job I have now, without my policy studies background and the guidance of Carol, Bill, Lisa and Michelle. Michelle always made sure I had enough PAF credits to graduate! Thanks for everything gang! Keep up the great work! [top]
Jeff J. Dennis '02
Employee with Deloitte
There are some courses of
study in college that will teach you facts,
a body of knowledge that may or may not be useful to draw upon over
the course of your career. This is great if you know exactly what you
want to do and are confident that you will never change your mind.
Policy Studies, on the other hand, teaches you how to learn and how to
interact with your environment. It provides you with a framework for
analyzing the world around you and a methodology for being effective
in whatever you are trying to accomplish. It is the ideal compliment
to a more industry specific major for those who have a passion for a
particular business, and also perfect for people who have no clue what
they want to do with their lives but want to be prepared for whatever
opportunity that may come along. [top] Sid Wolf '02 - Westin Rinehart When compared to other majors offered in the College of Arts and Sciences the Policy Studies degree will give you the most “real world” experience. The methodologies used in PAF 101 are actually pretty accurate. When creating public policy there are a host of serious problems and seldom there is never one easy answer. Translation, no matter how effective a policy solution is there is always some segment of the population that is aversely affected. I have had the opportunity to learn this first-hand while working on domestic policy issues ranging from banking to housing to other “social” policy initiatives being considered by the United States Congress. This is an important lesson for one to learn when studying and if you’re lucky enough, crafting public policy. Without the Policy Studies degree I would not have become proficient using Microsoft Excel, which I still use on a daily basis. My working knowledge of Excel was absolutely essential during my first job out of school on a political campaign. I was able to manipulate various data sets and, when applicable, present the data visually. Besides the philosophical grounding that one accrues, the opportunities offered specifically to policy studies students far outweigh any of the experiences that are designed in other majors’ curricula. PAF 315 is a terrible pain in the ass, but in retrospect this class might have been the most useful class I took at SU. It is far more involved than most undergraduate internships and also gives you tangible “real-world” experience that is resume worthy (I still have it on my resume three years after I graduated). After the class is completed, if you did it right, you really accomplish something and the experience will serve you well when you enter the real world. The other benefit of the degree is 410, which gives you yet another opportunity to do an internship for credit that is part of the curriculum. My internship consisted of doing grant writing work for the Syracuse Housing Authority. And as an intern I was able to get them thousands of dollars; it was also a very resume-worthy experience that caught the eye of my current employer. The degree gave me that essential balance of “real world” experience combined with the rigors that helped contribute to my current success in the real world. Another aspect of the program I enjoyed was the freedom to pursue other interests outside of the core. In my case, I was able to take classes offered by the Political Science Department that I otherwise wouldn’t have counted towards my major. [top]
Matt
Fischer '93 Senior Executive in AOL
Matt writes
success is built on the truism that facileness with language,
a keen sense of humor and an irresistibly attractive core message get you farther than endless anal analysis – and that truth should be taken wherever it may be found, whether statistics orbit or not. My own career and life are also in large part illustrations of this principle. I still work at AOL – I commute up to northern VA three days per week, and work from home – outside Asheville, NC – the other two. How, you may ask, did I score this sweetheart deal? It’s very complicated: I asked. They said yes. We moved. All of which goes to show that a barely-2.5 GPA student with good soft skills can not only rise to the level of executive director at the world’s largest online service, but can do so by working 40% of the time in his underwear. God, I love this country.
By the way, in case you actually do mention
parts of the e-mail to students, and anyone wants to know what I actually
do: I’m in charge of the AOL member experience of programming (which is
what we call editorial), promotions (links to programming, primarily from
the AOL Welcome Screen – our home page) and advertising on the AOL
service. What that means is that (a) I make sure our editorial folks are
meeting our basic needs for certain kinds of content and (b) make sure
that, outside the realm of (a), they don’t abuse our members too badly
in pursuit of advertising dollars. It’s a fun job, and one to which I am
well-suited. I’ve had it for about five weeks now. :) That’s the nice
thing about AOL – if you don’t like your job, you can just stick it
out, secure in the knowledge that a re-organization lurks just around the
corner.
That’s the single best thing about college for most people, by the way: the utter, absolute predictability. It’s the last time in most people’s lives when, for four years (give or take) they pretty much know exactly what’s going to happen and when. (And changing majors doesn’t count as “upheaval” by the way. That’s a walk in the park compared to surviving a layoff – or not surviving one.) Please tell the current crop of TAs not to mistake the opportunity they have – I still view my TA-ship during my first year as one of the seminal events (perhaps THE seminal event – especially the day I showed up so hung-over I actually hoped my head WOULD explode) of my college career… and thus my career… and thus my life. Truly. Also truly, please tell the PAF 101ers that I still use the techniques in Public Policy Skills every day – I’m always looking to expand my influence and control by acquiring veto power over things (thereby attaining a power rating of 5 in as many areas of life as possible), and I keep thinking I should put a Prince Chart in one of my PowerPoint decks one of these days. [top] Erin McErloy '91 High Level Executive for a Consulting Firm and A Devoted Fundraiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society of America.
A policy studies major is so much more than a course in citizenship and how to spend your life making a difference in our government and our world. It is a program that provides you with an environment to be creative and put your ideas and energy to work. As a result, when you get out into the world, no matter what industry, you have learned to push the envelope, believe the impossible, and work to make the world a better place. And this is so important because it is the calculated risk takers, with the courage to try new things, that end up succeeding. Throughout your career, you can learn a new technology, a new skill, a craft, but the experience that Policy Studies gives you through learning power, position, and influence, through problem solving, and through real world projects, will give you a foundation for anything that you want to do in a career and in life. My sincere thanks to Bill and the Policy Studies professors who challenged me, believed in me, and gave me a great start! [top] John Mandyck ’89 (MPA Maxwell ’92) – Vice President, Government & International Relations, Carrier Corporation Hardly a day goes by where I don’t rely on skills or instincts developed by the Policy Studies major. I was immediately drawn to the program because of its practical approach to actually doing something. Of course the eccentricities of Bill Coplin added an intriguing bonus. I’ll never forget that my freshman year textbook was The New York Times. It was the perfect, real-world compliment to the policy analysis skills learned in class, like identifying problems, policy alternatives, players and preferred approaches (the policy cycle that you’ll learn). To this day, I am a most critical reader of graphs and tables, looking always for the appropriate labels and data identification drilled into me as a freshman in PAF 101.Today, I manage domestic and international public policies and the resulting effects on a large global corporation. While public policy issues vary in substance and color across the globe, the method to understanding these issues, and what to do about them, are best managed through a consistent analytical approach. That’s what Policy Studies is all about. That’s why the major has served me so well in my professional development. The major by itself will not automatically create a career. Personal motivation must play its role. Students must create the future instead of just waiting for it to happen. Policy Studies is the tool box to creating a future. It offers practical skills that can be applied to any endeavor. [top] Robert E. Watson '79 - President & CEO, Concuity, Inc. When I came to SU in 1975, I was able to because of scholarships and work study programs during the school year. My family while not on welfare clearly fell into the category of what the media currently refers to as the “working poor.” I came into the Policy Studies program during my sophomore year. At some point your office connected me with a CUNY researcher doing a project with trouble youths in Syracuse for a paid part time research position. That position became a full time summer job so that I did not have to return to the family farm and mend fences or work as a house painter along side my father. I continued to work on this project until my graduation. The ability to do this changed my life in many ways. First, I learned skills needed for the working world that I would never have learned in class. Second, it imbedded on my brain the idea of “doing good things” and “giving back.” Third, it allowed me to go straight from SU to the Wharton School of Business (I was, I believe, one of less than ten people out of a class of 600+ that came directly from undergrad to the MBA program at Penn.). I could have easily been bartender you noted in your article but for that internship. The second point above has carried with me into my professional life. For example, we (as in Concuity) are member of a San Francisco area organization called the Entrepreneurs Foundation. We gave equity in this company and commit, as a company, to 2-3 community based events per year. One of our projects this year was to clean, restock, paint, etc… the Ronald McDonald House at Children’s Hospital of Oakland, CA. At a personal level my wife and I also make sure that we contribute to the betterment of our communities as well by gifts of time (frankly, in many ways, we feel this is more meaningful than cash as it is “real”), frequent flyer miles (this is a big help to make-a-wish type organizations), etc … Anyway, the point of this is say thank you for the introduction your office made possible over 25 years ago. Without it, I might very well be back in Harpursville, NY painting houses to make ends meet will struggling to keep a farm operating. I have never forgotten how it changed my life and I try to do my part to give back to the communities in which I live and work.
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In
the world of technology consulting with IBM, I still get questions, like "what
was your major in school" even though I graduated in 1991. This could be
because of my baby face, which I like to think is the reason, or because I
have had success in my career and people are curious as to how and where I
learned my skills. I always answer "Policy Studies" and I almost always
see a perplexed look followed by another question, such as "What the heck it
that? Political Science or something?" I then start to brag about
this incredible professor who inspired me, drove me crazy, challenged me, made
me want to scream at him at times, and taught me to stand up for something and
to DO something with my life. Then, I start thinking, I am so glad that
Bill can't hear this, because it might go to his head. 