Stonehill Seniors Searching for Careers

By Gabrielle Damico

College may be the best four years of a student’s life; but few want to think about finding a job following graduation in May.

Macayla Walsh, a 21-year-old from Kingston, Massachusetts and a senior Marketing major looking for full-time work in the wine and spirits industry.

“So far the job search has been a little dry. The bad part about being a Marketing major is that companies don’t want to start hiring for those positions until the Spring semester. I guess all I can do is keep looking,” Walsh said.

Walsh currently works 20 hours a week for a company called Half Bottle selling canned wine on the marketing and advertising team.

“I really could see myself landing a career in this industry. It’s fun, exciting and always changing,” Walsh said.

Walsh has utilized the Career Development Center, known as the CDC to get her dream job on a sales and marketing team.

The CDC is an on-campus office that offers a number of services for students looking to enter the workforce.

Walsh said she has used the center’s mock interview service to prepare themselves for real time interviews.

According to the center’s statistics, Stonehill’s graduating class of 2018 has a placement rate of 94 percent. This means that 94 percent of students were employed, in graduate school, or post-graduate service within six months after graduating.

 Of that 94 percent, 82 percent reported that they are happy with their job placement.

Omar Rodriguez is the Assistant Director of Engagement and Inclusion. He works in the CDC with students to help them find career opportunities.

“It’s mainly important to help students figure out what they want to do, from there we can do our job in helping them achieve that goal,” Rodriguez said.

Tim Fratini is a 21-year-old from Springfield, Massachusetts and an accounting major. He knows where he will work, even though graduation is months away.

 “Being in accounting is nice, just because if you play your cards right, you can have your plan set before senior year even starts,” he said.

This is exactly what Fratini did. From networking, he was able to land a job with BDO, a Boston based accounting firm as an associate in their insurance practice.

“So even though I got the job offer, I don’t start until January of 2020. This may seem really far off, but it’s actually really great for me because it gives me time to get my CPA,” Fratini said.

While Fratini has to go back to school for his CPA certification, for other graduates, going back to school is a choice they don’t have to make, but choose to.

Brendan McManus, a 21-year-old from Medfield, Massachusetts is planning on going to graduate school for a master’s degree.

McManus, a senior Management Information Systems major with a Data Science minor, will be getting a master’s in the science of analytics.

“I’m choosing to stay in school just to continue to learn about this topic. I didn’t establish my major until later on and am still trying to figure out what I want to do with it,” McManus said.

“Not only will getting a master’s give me more knowledge in my field of interest, but it will also put me above some of the people I may be competing against for jobs later on,” he said.

Aside from continuing school or getting a job right after graduation in May, this student is taking an unconventional route.

Brooke Hindle, a 22-year-old from Burlington, Massachusetts finishes school in December. She has enough credits to fulfill a degree a semester early.

Hindle, a senior Integrated Marketing and Communications major, said she was surprised when she learned she had enough credits to finish a semester early.

“I wasn’t actively trying to graduate early, it just happened that way by overloading and taking extra courses,” Hindle said.

“I’ve been job searching since October and I finally have an offer for a PR company in Boston. This would actually be really perfect for me because I could save some money by living at home and commuting in,” she said.

Hindle believes that graduating early gives her an advantage because by the time the rest of her class graduates, she’ll have four months of experience under her belt.

There’s no one traditional way to finish school and enter the real world. However, Stonehill takes pride in their post graduate statistics because no matter how a student finishes, a vast majority have full time job placements soon after graduating.