Base illustration courtesy of iStock/Olga Strelnikova Networking
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April 21, 2021 Twitter Facebook
It was still February, but Fiorella Duarte, who would be graduating from the Questrom School of Business at the end of the semester, decided that it was not too early to start looking for a job. Duarte (Questrom’21), enrolled in the Master of Science in Management Studies (MSMS) program, signed into BU’s new networking platform, BU Connects, and followed the cues to find a mentor.
The person she found was Oracle employee Leanne Quinn (Pardee’20), and Quinn was happy to help. She set up a Zoom call and explained how things work at Oracle, from the interview process to the corporate culture. Three days later, Duarte was meeting with an Oracle recruiter, and two weeks after that she was offered a job as a business development consultant.
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Shubhankar Arun’s life since graduating last May shows the wisdom of zigging when you’d rather zag. After COVID-19 floored the economy last year, he shifted his job expectations and hopped continents as well.
Plan A had been to stay in the United States for a year on his work visa and look for a job in media. But in March 2020, Arun (COM’20) recalls, “Overnight, all job prospects everything just went completely out the window. I’d be talking to people and then [they’d] stop replying.…As an international student, it was five times as hard.”