Giving Back and Keeping in Touch: Peer Coaching

Madeline Verbeten, ’16 BSB, graduated with a double major in finance and accounting. Like Grev, she took a position at West Monroe. “I support mergers and acquisitions,” she says, describing how she is currently managing the separation of a business unit from a multi-billion dollar company and setting it up as a separate company.

Verbeten would be the first to say that she owes a lot of this new-found responsibility to the career centers. “When I started at Carlson, I frequently went to the career center to learn about different career paths based on my interests,” she says. “I attended a ton of info sessions and networking events that were put on by the career center.”

As she started to figure out what she wanted to do after graduation, she used the career center for mock interviews, resume reviews, attending a career fair, and browsing the Edge. “The career centers provided me with almost instant access to hundreds of organizations and thousands of professionals within the Carlson community,” she says. “The Edge, which aggregated job postings from those organizations, was a great tool that helped me filter out opportunities that interested me.”

Her most valuable experience, however, was simply talking with the career center staff. “They gave me a chance to talk through my interests, opportunities, and steps I could take to get where I wanted to be,” she says. “They were always willing to listen and talk through my questions and gave each student the individual support they needed.”

She found the experience so valuable, in fact, that she discovered a way to pass it on before graduation. “Senior year I actually worked at the career center as a peer career coach and it was a great opportunity to take what I had learned the past few years and help other students figure out their interests and pursue meaningful careers,” she says.