JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

It’s that time of year.  Seniors are either celebrating their job offers or are hard at working on applications and interview prep.

If you are among the first group, Prebusiness wants to hear from you!  Tell us where you’ll be in the fall and what you’ll be doing.  We will add your name to our database of alum and keep you in mind for future events!

If you are still looking,  don’t worry!  Keep up the good work, visit Career planning, and come to our events.  We are offering several speakers and panels  this semester that may help your job search.  Check out our website for more information.

As always, don’t forget to “Like” us on FACEBOOK and look for our WIB, SBP and ELW groups on LinkedIN!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor

Welcome Back & Upcoming Events!

It’s a new year, a new semester and a new blog post!  We hope you all had a nice long winter break.  We’ve got a great spring schedule planned and are looking forward to seeing lots of new faces at our events.  Make sure to check the COES & Prebusiness calendar regularly so you don’t miss out.

Here is a quick look at the 2 speakers we are co-sponsoring with Career Planning next week.

Leadership Careers After Holy Cross:

Hear from Crusaders turned Corporate Executives

Fred Eppinger ’81

President & CEO of The Hanover Insurance Group

Dick Lavey ‘89

Senior Vice President, Chief Marketing and Distribution Officer

Tuesday, January 31 • 6:00-7:30pm • Hogan Jenks Suite A

Fred Eppinger returns to Holy Cross to speak about The Hanover’s Future Leaders Program, his leadership journey, and the insurance industry.

Space is limited so please RSVP in Crusader Connections by Monday, January 30th. After you log-in, click on the “Workshops/Events” tab. Attire is business casual.

For more information on Fred Eppinger and The Hanover Insurance group, please click on the following links:

Leader’s Edge Magazine “The Wizard of Worcester”

Fred Eppinger Profile – Holy Cross Magazine

“Think Public Relations is About Schmoozing and Spinning?”

Eric Starkman

President and founder of STARKMAN, a New York based public relations agency.

Thursday, Feb. 2 6:30 p.m. Hogan  Suites B & C

Check out this great article about the event!

As always, don’t forget to “Like” us on FACEBOOK and look for our WIB, SBP and ELW groups on LinkedIN!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor

Executive Leadership Workshop update

After 3 very busy weeks, I finished my last ELW interview!  We have a great group of applicants and a great line-up of alumni coming back to campus in March.  Watch your email, acceptance letters will be mailed on Friday!

For those of you that are “ELW Alum” feel free to email prebusiness@holycross.edu with your favorite memories or success stories from ELW, we’d love to hear from you!

As always, don’t forget to “Like” us on FACEBOOK and look for our WIB, SBP and ELW groups on LinkedIN!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor

Women in Business 2011

On Saturday, October 22, we hosted the sixth annual Women in Business conference here on campus.  With over 150 alumnae and students in attendance, the conference was a huge hit!  The Prebusiness office wants to thank the student organizers  Juliana Biolsi ’12, Kristen Buonassisi ’12, Lauren McCarthy ’12, Christie Cannone ’14, Haley O’Brien ’13, Stephanie Pajak ’13, and Lauren Esposito ’14, for their hard-work and dedication to this event.

If you weren’t able to attend, Juliana and Kristen wrote a great recap for the Holy Cross website:

Women in Business Conference Continues to Inspire Students, Alumnae

Save the date for next year’s conference: October 20, 2012!

As always, don’t forget to “Like” us on FACEBOOK and look for our WIB, SBP and ELW groups on LinkedIN!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor

Spring Break Plans? Why Not ELW?

Considering the unexpected and, in my opinion, unwelcome snow-storm over the weekend, it’s not entirely surprising that I’m thinking about Spring already.  While I can definitely see the appeal of heading to warmer climates, I urge you to consider sticking around campus and participating in the Executive Leadership Workshop.  This is our longest-running and most popular program.  It’s a one-week immersion into the world of business: how to start a business, creating a business plan, valuation, growing a business, international business, and more.  It’s a crazy week of non-stop, hands-on learning.

Oh, did I mention it’s a competition?  Teams of 5 will compete against each other, developing a business plan for a new product or business that they will present to a panel of  mock venture capitalists.  The winning team gets a cash prize and a year of bragging rights.

Applications are due Friday, November 11th – so get started ASAP!

ELW is totally FREE!  All meals are included! This is a competitive program, only 40 seats available.  Visit our webpage, stop by the Prebusiness office, or ask someone who has participated for more info.  It’s worth it.

You can always go to Costa Rica next year.

As always, don’t forget to “Like” us on FACEBOOK and look for our WIB, SBP and ELW groups on LinkedIN!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor

Finance Boot Camp – The Beginning

The COES & Prebusiness office has been hard at work all summer and this past month preparing the first ever FINANCE BOOT CAMP.  This highly competitive program is stirring up interest all over campus.  Here’s a quick overview:

  • 4-day immersion in the framework and careers of Wall Street.
  • Interview prep simulating the fast paced, intense environment of a Super Day.
  • Networking opportunity with HC alum working on Wall Street.

We have interviewed 78 extremely qualified candidates for 30 coveted spots.

This program, like all other COES programs, brings successful alumni back to campus to help better prepare HC students for jobs in business, specifically finance in this case.  It’s bound to be an intense and exhausting week and we’ll be blogging each day, so watch for updates.

As always, don’t forget to “Like” us on FACEBOOK and look for our WIB, SBP and ELW groups on LinkedIN!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor

The Blog is back!

After a summer break, the Prebusiness blog is back! We’ve found it’s been a great way to “link” you to our programs!

We’ve got a great fall schedule lined up for everyone, including the much anticipated FINANCE BOOT CAMP.  I’ll post our schedule next week, but visit our website for more info!

Over the summer, we moved!  Come visit and check out the new offices in Stein 129E.

If you haven’t registered for Prebusiness yet, click here!

As always, don’t forget to “Like” us on FACEBOOK and look for our WIB, SBP and ELW groups on LinkedIN!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor

Summer Business Program Video

Just a quick post to let everyone know about the amazing Summer Business Program video on the Holy Cross website.  It looks great and kudos to all of our students and executives who have made SBP such a successful program!  Check it out!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor

Summer Business Program: Week 3 & 4

Here’s the rest of week 3 and the start of week 4 from Quinn!

Quinn Korzeniecki is a senior English major with a Pre-Business concentration. She is editor-in-chief of The Advocate, a progressive online publication at Holy Cross, and works as an assistant in the Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs Office. As a participant in the Summer Business Program, she hopes to learn more about marketing and advertising aspects of business. Quinn aspires to enter into publishing either in the editorial, marketing, or advertising departments.

A couple of weeks have passed since my last blog, so here’s what you’ve missed:

On Tuesday, June 14, a few General Electric employees (who were all Holy Cross alumni) came to instruct us on how to use excel spreadsheets in data analysis. I honestly thought I knew all there was to know about Excel, but after a day chocked full of learning how to install hyperlinks,  take the sums and averages of cells using functions, and even how to sort and filter a data set. I realized after this lesson that I didn’t know as much as I thought I did, and am grateful that I can now use a function to rearrange names into alphabetical order instead of taking hours to manually to do so. What am I going to do with all the time this lesson just saved me?

We learned how to create PowerPoint designs and presentations on Wednesday. Although this was more of a straightforward lesson for me, I did learn many new concepts as well. These three General Electric employees taught me how to paste whole internet sites into a slide, and also how to add an icon to the slide that links to a spreadsheet containing data to support the information provided on that slide. We were then able to experiment with shapes and fonts to familiarize ourselves with all the available formatting options. Later that day, after the conclusions of the PowerPoint lesson, we put on our Summer Business Program t-shirts and assembled outside Smith Labs for our group pictures. They all came out great!

Thursday was a bit of a shocker! We were instructed to come to the morning session in interview attire, but we weren’t aware that we would actually sit in a chair in the front of the class and be interviewed on camera in front of our peers. I will say that this was my first time being recorded, and as intimidating as it was, it was helpful to see myself as I interviewed: I learned that I move my head too much and that I look uptight with my hair pulled back so tightly. So, after analyzing our interview tapes, we dissembled for lunch. The afternoon session consisted of a site visit to Blue Hive, Inc. with Holy Cross alumnus, Jack Hally. This company creates large scale displays for companies such as Covidien and Liberty Mutual. This trip was amazing! The work environment was split into two sectors: very creative and very hands-on. Some staffers have to create the layout for the exhibits and others must physically build these displays in the workshops. Mr. Hally was very excited about the work being done at his company, and this excitement definitely rubbed off on us.

Bill Liesman ’72, a business consultant, came to speak with us on Friday, June 17th about international business. We learned in earlier weeks that emerging markets all over the world are looking promising in the stock world, and today we learned a little about why this is happening. Globalization is occurring on a massive scale and the world is becoming more interdependent: going global allows companies to increase their market base/share, increase profit, and better compete with other companies in their market. We learned about inventory practices and international law against corrupt global practices. In the afternoon we were assigned a natural disaster (my group received the earthquake in Chile) and were asked to create a PowerPoint revealing how the disaster affected the world’s supply chain of a specific product and what precautions the country should have taken to avoid the detrimental effects.

After an eventful weekend, the program reconvened on Monday with a visit from Michael Villa ’91 and Bob Allard ’91 explaining the process of starting a business.  These innovators had us thinking like entrepreneurs and eventually being entrepreneurial! Each team had to design an iphone application and present their app to the group.  We were hesitant at first, but Bob and Mike had tons of energy that was both motivating and encouraging.

We wrap up the program in a couple days with our group presentations, and I look forward to seeing what the other groups have in store for us!

Thanks again, Quinn! If you have any questions about SBP, please email us at prebusiness@holycross.edu. Don’t forget to find us on facebook!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor

Summer Business Program: Week 3

Quinn is back with another SBP post!

Quinn Korzeniecki is a senior English major with a Pre-Business concentration. She is editor-in-chief of The Advocate, a progressive online publication at Holy Cross, and works as an assistant in the Vice President and Dean of Academic Affairs Office. As a participant in the Summer Business Program, she hopes to learn more about marketing and advertising aspects of business. Quinn aspires to enter into publishing either in the editorial, marketing, or advertising departments.


Wow, how quickly time passes when you’re learning about the different aspects of business!

As I said at the end of my last post, on Wednesday we learned about what it means to work in the financial sect of the business world as a venture capitalist and how to choose the best way to fund a new business. We learned about Warren Buffett’s amazing work as one of the most successful venture capitalists in his company, Berkshire Hathaway. As a member of a venture firm, one must value companies based on their profitability, growth, and risk. I learned a term I never heard of before: EBITDA, which means “earnings before interest, tax, depreciation, and amortization.” Tom Flynn instructed us to throw that term into a financial interview to clinch the position. In the end of the session we were sent off into our groups and assigned the task of picking which company we would buy stock in, either Facebook or Google. Although I am obsessed with social networking, my group ultimately picked Google because a new social networking site will probably enter the spotlight within the next year or so and make Facebook obsolete.

Two former football playing Holy Cross alumni came in on Thursday to speak about marketing and sales. Peter George, the CEO of Fidelis Security Systems, spoke about the qualities of a successful salesperson. He filled us in on SPIN, or the science of selling, which is a four step way to assure that you are maximizing your potential as a salesperson. Since I am competitive, smart, hard-working, and a team player, I could definitely see myself going into this field of business! Terry Waters, the CEO of the Yankee Group, taught us about B2B (Business to Business) marketing, through which companies sell products and services to other businesses that in turn sell them to the consumer. The best marketing departments have board commitment, knowledge of the target market, and have a clear, quantified, focused, realistic, and resourced marketing plan. All companies want to have a combination of vision and ability to execute, and those that fall short either run out of money and need to ask for more debt or equity or fail. It’s survival of the fittest in America these days!

On Friday, Ian Dowe, another football alumnus came to Smith Labs 155 to speak with us about advertising. This workshop was completely different from the previous ones: we were asked to bring in magazines and links to advertisements on Youtube and used these ads to learn what runs through the minds of those working in an advertising firm when they are creating one of these promotions. After analyzing a nail polish ad in which a woman’s fingernails matched the eyes of a tiger and wore a large diamond ring, I realized that advertisements do indeed play into our wants and desires: we all want to be more desirable, and advertisers play into this to get you to buy their product. We broke into our groups with the task of advertising a product: my group created a new product, the “Shrup,” or shrinkable and portable cup. It was interesting to learn about the thought that goes into advertisements and it was even more beneficial to advertise for a product ourselves.

After a weekend of relaxation, shopping in Providence, and more relaxation, we got back to the grind. Monday morning we received a brief introduction to microeconomics with Professor Cahill. We learned about making decisions based on weighing opportunity costs. In our teams, we competed against each other making deals that served as examples of imperfect competition: a lot of friendships were broken by cheating team members, but they made amends in the next round when we made bids on bonds. Some ended up winning by a large margin to keep the peace (but I don’t think that’s how it would work in the real world). In the afternoon we learned about business organizations ranging from sole proprietorships to corporations. All in all, the past four days were a great success, and I look forward to learning how to use Microsoft Excel in the business world.

Thanks, Quinn! If you have any questions about SBP, please email us at prebusiness@holycross.edu. Don’t forget to find us on facebook!

Kaithlyn

Kaithlyn Kayer
Associate Director, Entrepreneurial Studies

David Chu
Director, Entrepreneurial Studies & Pre-business Advisor