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Below is a letter to Bentley’s Undergraduate Career Services from current Freshman Hannah Rauch, who was able to apply the skills learned in Bentley’s Career Development course (CDI 101) to a real-life networking experience.
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Dear Bentley Undergraduate Career Services,
I thought I would email you to tell you a funny story about my weekend. I went down to NYC to visit my high school friend who goes to NYU. I traveled down with one of my high school classmates, who happens to go to also goes to school in Cambridge. We both finish class fairly early on Fridays, so we planned on going down to visit my grandparents who live in northern NJ and staying with them on Friday night before we went into the city on Saturday morning.
So we got on the 6:20 pm NJ Transit train going towards Dover after our bus arrived in the city. Because of the timing it was full of people commuting home. There was a man sitting doing work, and the two seats facing him were open so I asked him if he minded if my friend and I sat with him. He said of course we could sit there and we proceeded to sit down. He was doing some work on his computer and my friend and I were just talking to each other. At one point my friend asked if my back was okay after carrying my accounting textbook (GB112/212) textbook around for so long in my backpack after all of the walking we did around the city. We continued to chat amongst ourselves and after the train had cleared out a little bit the man said to us “I’m just going to finish up this email and then I will move over to a different seat so you can have some more room, but before that I have some questions for you two.”
So he finished sending his email and then asked me, “So I heard you talking about your accounting textbook. Are you an accounting student?” So I gave him my elevator pitch. And he replied with “Well I am a partner at KPMG and so many of our interns have come from Bentley. It’s a fantastic school and we do so much recruiting up there. We actually had a junior from the Morristown area work with us this summer.” So after some more talking, asking a little bit about the accounting path, what made him decide to be in his current profession ect., he gave me his card and said that honestly, he loves being able to meet young people who are interested in this career path and if I ever need anything, please do not hesitate to give him a call or send him an email.
This morning, I sent him a personalized invitation to connect on LinkedIn and emailed him just to reiterate how I enjoyed meeting him, and how appreciative I am that he offered to allow me to reach out to him at any time. I will probably email him again in a few months, maybe at the end of school, and try to set up an informational meeting just so I can learn a little bit more about KPMG, from his perspective, and that industry.
Honestly, I think the best part about this whole situation was that we had literally just finished talking about this in CDI on Thursday, and then this happened on Friday. Needless to say, I am very happy that my LinkedIn profile was complete and I knew what to say to him. It just goes to show, you really never know who you are going to run into.
Best,
Hannah Rauch
