Twenty-eight engineering and business students spent their spring break exploring future careers as part of MSU’s Career Services Network Spring Break Corporate Tour.
For six days, representatives from the Career Services Network in both the Eli Broad College of Business and the College of Engineering took students to corporate headquarters of six major corporations in Minnesota. Among the companies visited during this year’s tour were 3M, IBM, General Mills and Target.
“We want to give students the opportunity to see what it is like to work in corporate America,” said Pepa Carlson, Career Services Network representative in the Eli Broad College of Business, and the original organizer of the corporate tour.
The trip included tours of each company, meetings with executives and, new this year, a community service excursion organized by one of the companies with a local charity.
This year, the group went to a warehouse in Minneapolis to assemble food packets for Feed My Starving Children, a Christian charity distributing food internationally.
Seeing how companies operate in real life and having a chance to talk to employers were the best parts of the trip, said Haihua Gu, a freshman from China studying civil engineering.
“It opened my eyes; I saw things, I heard things and I gained valuable experience that you will not get out of a lecture,” said Gu.
And Yuanyuan Fu, a freshman from China studying accounting, said visiting famous American companies and talking to employees face-to-face has given her a more conscious outlook on her future.
“‘You can do whatever you want’ has new meaning,” said Yuanyuan Fu, after hearing the same sentence repeated multiple times at each company.
Organizers of the tour hope to have more participation from other colleges on campus, and plan to include more corporations as the tour grows. Inquiries about the tour may be sent to carlson@bus.msu.edu.