How Carlson’s MHRIR Degree Powers HR Careers

What Lin didn’t expect was how much he’d enjoy it. “It’s an environment where, as a student, you can really learn in such a safe and comfortable environment. And yet it’s not easy work,” Lin says. “The professors and staff have high standards; they challenge you.”

A people analytics elective became one of his favorites, taught by a professor he admired so much that he signed up for the class solely based on her involvement. “Her classes were so hard,” he says, “but I just loved them. I felt like I got so much out of every single session.” Among other skills, he learned how to recast recruiting and retention data as visualizations that help business leaders understand challenges, make informed decisions, and communicate their goals and objectives. “That’s been incredibly valuable in building my reputation,” Lin says.

Lin landed a job at 3M while pursuing his degree and moved into a management role not long after graduating in 2023. He credits the program with changing how he approaches leadership tasks. “I think about people differently,” he says. “I learned how to be more empathetic, while also holding people accountable.”

“Even if you’re not sure HR is the career you want to be in, the program will teach you something,” Lin says, adding that his past and current ties to the school have proved invaluable. (He currently serves on the MHRIR alumni board.) “I learned new things, built new skills and met some really great people — the kind of people who will be in my life forever.”
 

Cultivating a New Career

Jenna (Conzemius) Longo, ’19 BSB, ’21 MHRIR, grew up on a farm in southern Minnesota. Her family raised beef cattle, and she always assumed her career would circle back to the family business. To prepare for that future, she decided to major in Marketing as an undergraduate student at Carlson.

But an elective that Longo took in her final semester, a course in HR, rerouted her career path. It opened her eyes to the way a strong and supportive corporate culture can transform a brand. If the right values are in place, recruitment and retention are easy — and from that flows stability, trust, innovation and profits. “I suddenly thought, ‘Am I going in the right direction?’” she recalls. “It felt like the next frontier for business: the idea that companies that have really strong HR departments can differentiate themselves.”

Her mentor, Scott Peterson, ’83 MHRIR, a human resources executive, urged her to apply to the master’s program, so Longo enrolled straight out of undergrad. The program opened her eyes to aspects of HR she had never considered. Longo discovered, for example, how much of HR runs on data. “People imagine Toby from ‘The Office,’” she jokes, “but HR doesn’t work like that.” The program armed her with analytics skills that she used in an HR role at Caribou Coffee, where she leveraged employee engagement survey results from thousands of frontline workers to shape training and retention efforts. “People forget that even a field like HR is deeply rooted in data analysis these days,” she says.

Since completing her degree, Longo has tapped into Carlson’s strong MHRIR alumni network throughout her career, starting at Land O’Lakes before moving to Caribou Coffee and then H.B. Fuller, where she started a new role as senior talent manager partner this summer.

The master’s degree provided confidence and skills, Longo says, but the network of alumni has expanded her opportunities to use those skills. “The alumni network makes the Twin Cities, which can seem pretty big, feel smaller,” she says. “Carlson opens up a lot of doors, and that really matters when you’re looking to advance your career. It’s not just what you know, it’s who you know — and the program helps with both those levers.”
 

A Broader Perspective

Fresh out of college, Alicia Gutierrez, ’17 MHRIR, joined a Twin Cities consulting firm and put her accounting degree to work, first as an auditor and then as a compensation analyst. Neither job felt like a perfect fit, however, so when the company asked her to assist with some recruiting efforts, reaching out to potential candidates across HR, legal, compliance and IT, she jumped at the chance.

The new role hooked her. “I found that I really enjoy interacting with others,” she says. Talking with candidates about their professional paths, she says, “felt very much like it was my passion.” The realization sent her looking for a formal way into HR, and Carlson’s reputation and convenient location made the decision fairly straightforward.

After enrolling, she was immediately struck by her cohort’s range of experience. “The students were from all over the world: Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia,” she says. “That was just a whole other level of understanding for me. There was a global perspective.”

The program also broadened her sense of HR itself, well beyond the recruiting work she already knew. “Just to see all of the different areas where HR shapes an organization was really interesting to me,” Gutierrez says. Benefits and workplace wellness are among the areas she came to appreciate more deeply.

Since graduating, Gutierrez, who is bilingual in Spanish, has built a career in talent acquisition and, more recently, learning and development, holding HR roles at 3M, Meta and Cargill along the way. She currently works as an onboarding specialist at medical-device maker Medtronic. Although leaving her consulting job years ago to attend school full-time was a financial risk, in hindsight it was definitely the right move, she says: “My career has taken off so much from my degree. I’ve made so many connections, and it’s opened so many doors for me career-wise,” including referrals from fellow alumni that led directly to new roles.

Her advice for prospective students is to come in open-minded and use everything the school offers, not just its career services office. “Reach out to alumni,” she says. “It’s such a large group of people that you can learn from, even before you graduate.” She endorses the program without hesitation. “Anytime someone asks me about my master’s degree,” she says, “I always recommend Carlson.”