What’s next for a Penn State student after getting their degree?
Here are what some graduating students have planned.
UNIVERSITY PARK, P.a. — Every college student at one point in their academic career has worried about what to do after they get that diploma.
Whether it’s a job offer in their field or an internship to take a step into their career, most students want a solid plan before coming out of college.
New Beginnings
Mackenzie Myers types on her Macbook with her boyfriend seated next to her at a table in the library. Their preferred study location is the Humanities Reading Room on the second floor of the Pattee Library.
Referred to as the Harry Potter Room for its similarity to the inside of Hogwarts, the green lamps and old feel of the room do make it feel like its own little world. These qualities, plus a no-talking rule, are what make it a desired place to study for many students.
The ambient noise of other students simply existing is almost calming; keyboards being typed, the rustle of clothing as bodies shift, flipping textbook pages.
Her boyfriend of almost a year, Ethan Balcik, described her as hardworking despite the stress many seniors face in the final months. He personally understands how taxing working while balancing things like clubs and a job can be, because he did it his first two years of college.
“I’m constantly impressed with how much work she puts in to each individual thing and how well she does in all of them,” Balcik said.
Myers was born and raised in a small town in the suburbs of Philly “like everyone else”, she joked.
Her immediate family is an average size. With a stay-at-home mom and her dad as a web developer, the only other person is her sister, who want’s to go to school for animation.
Of course, pets are family too. Myers has two corgis, Cosmo and Koda, who have their own Instagram account (@crazycorgicosmo).
She claimed to have had a normal childhood; being born, growing up, and graduating from high school all in the same place meant nothing too extraordinary happened.
“I eventually chose to go to Penn State, just kind of on a whim, but I have no regrets about that decision,” she said.
Currently, she has a part-time internship with Surge Business Development, a local company in downtown State College.
However, Myers recently accepted a job offer for August with the software company SISCO as a consulting engineer. There, she’ll help develop solutions for clients that use their product to better their design and usage.
While Myers admits this isn’t really a job in her field, she believes it will be a stepping stone to make connections and get her name out there.
The day after she graduates, Myers will be packing up her stuff and moving to Raleigh, North Carolina, with her boyfriend, both for the first time. She admits that it is a pretty big change.
“I’m pretty excited though,” she laughed. “I really don’t like the cold every day here.”
Engineers make the world go ‘round
Michael Tauriello, graduating with a degree in industrial engineering, is the youngest of four. He has two older brothers and an older sister; his eldest brother also went to Penn State.
Born and raised in Frederick, Maryland, Tauriello originally came to Penn State as a mechanical engineering major. The College of Engineering holds major nights, he said, and after attending the ones for mechanical, industrial, and civil he decided to change to industrial engineering.
“Mechanical told me I could do anything I want with a degree and I didn’t really like that…that was too vague for me,” he said. “Industrial offered the good deal of versatility I wanted with some definition to the degree.”
Tauriello said that he was more interested in how things are made, which is more what industrial engineering explored while mechanical was more about what was being made.
Throughout his college academic career, Tauriello had two summer internships.
In Summer 2020 he worked as a process engineering intern for Ultra Electronics in Lancaster. He focused on the manufacturing of Electronic Flight Termination Receivers and made sure they were processed and tested properly so they could be bought.
Last summer, Tauriello had an internship in Asheville, North Carolina, at Thermo Fisher Scientific. He worked on the manufacturing floor and oversaw a team of operators that focused on building tanks for the companies ultra low temperature freezer tanks.
“If you got a Moderna or Pfizer COVID vaccine, it was likely stored in [one],” he said.
The job he recently accepted for after graduation is similar to the one in Asheville, he said, but far less physically demanding because those tanks were heavy. Tauriello will be doing a two year program in a processing job with USPS as an Operations Industrial Engineer Trainee. After the two years are up, the ‘Trainee’ part of the title will be removed.
He’ll be tasked with communicating with operators and management of the mail sorting machines to figure out ways to sort mail faster and more efficiently.
Tauriello said he’s willing to see where this job will take him but doesn’t think it’ll be a permanent job; most people leave after the two years are up. As Onward State’s visual editor, he hopes to one day work for someplace like Canon or Kodak.
“I tell people my dream is to have photography and engineering intertwine at some point,” he said. “So I’m not willing to let go of that just yet.”
Business in the front
If she could live anywhere in the world, Brianna Mckeon said she’d live on a remote island where she could live semi-off grid. Not have to worry about money or anything else and just enjoy life.
Some of her favorite things to do are cook and watch reality TV, but the kind that’s not trashy, she clarified. Born and raised in Columbus, New Jersey, Mckeon has two younger teenage siblings: a 12-year-old brother and a 16-year-old sister.
She chose her major mostly because of her parents. Mckeon knew she wanted to go into business and she said her parents told her she would either do accounting or finance.
“I took an accounting course — I hated it — so I was like alright, finance it is,” Mckeon said.
She’ll be starting an internship in the summer at Church & Dwight in Ewing, New Jersey. There, she’ll work as a sales financial analyst.
Once the fall semester starts, Mckeon will start her Master’s degree in corporate finance. Her short term plan is to receive an offer from her internship to continue being a financial analyst or find another company to do the job at.
She said that she definitely plans on using the next academic school year to network and keep her options open to whatever opportunities end up coming her way.
“I never really had a dream job…but the more I’ve gone through school I’ve realized I want to be a professor,” Mckeon said. “I guess in the long run [the internship] is helping me get there, not directly, but it’s something I’m open to doing.”
