Giving Back and Keeping in Touch: You Can't Underutilize the Career Center

Since 2016, Michael Robinson, ’14 MBA, has been a men’s health field marketing manager at Boston Scientific. He has a great passion for his job, working with doctors across the Midwest to help people lead happier and healthier lives. This was not what he originally intended.

“Most of my life I thought I was going to be an attorney,” he says. “But I realized that dream was more of a nightmare at that time.”

That time happened to be a nadir in employment opportunities for lawyers, or, the worst time in history for graduates to come out of law school, as Robinson puts it. Plus, he didn’t care for the stress-filled and negatively competitive environment he found himself in.

So, after his first semester at law school, Robinson made the jump to Carlson. “It was not until I began the MBA program that I was positive that the business world is where I wanted to be and the legal world was a dream of the past,” he says. “I had the opportunity to start from scratch, using the career centers to not only know what my options were, but going through building a resume, how to ask questions in the industry, how to network. Once or twice a week I was there learning how to switch paths into the business world. It’s amazing—you ask for help from career services and they will work as hard as you do.”

An event that helped change Robinson’s life trajectory was his Carlson Goes West journey. “The Twin Cities has a great hotbed of business, but healthcare was my focus and I wanted to explore other areas of the country,” he says. “I had the opportunity to see healthcare industries and actually meet people and make connections. That trip enabled an access that by just being in Minneapolis you would never be able to obtain.”

Carlson Goes West was how Robinson ended up at Boston Scientific. “I looked at a lot of different companies and the career centers helped me narrow my lens,” he says. “They got me down the path to figure out a couple of companies to focus on and they enabled me to obtain an internship without professional experience.”

Robinson spent the summer of 2013 interning at Boston Scientific in its interventional cardiology group. “I had a great experience and received a job offer that I ended up taking,” he says. But his contact with the career centers didn’t end after graduation. Working as a product manager at Boston Scientific, he was evaluating a few different opportunities within the organization and sought GBCC Director Maggie Tomas’ advice. “In a couple of different conversations with Maggie, I realized they were not the right opportunities for me,” he says. “Both conversations pushed me to explore other opportunities that were even more aligned with what I wanted—greater life purpose, more active in healthcare—and helped me find the job I’m in today.”

Robinson says, for any student, you can’t underutilize the career center. “I am extremely grateful to have access to such a wonderful resource,” he says. “Having gone to another school and met with career services there, I was shocked when I came to the Carlson School and so impressed with the full extent of assistance they gave me.”