After working in consulting firms and startups, Audrey del Rosario (McDonough, ‘20) came to Georgetown and discovered her interest in human capital strategy. While she’ll be entering a role in this field after graduation, del Rosario has explored this passion further while an MBA student at Georgetown by serving as the VP Of Career for the McDonough Student Government Association. In this interview, del Rosario shares how she navigated her career transition to human capital, the initiatives she’s launched to help her fellow MBA students find career opportunities, and her advice to prospective MBA students about how to find your dream career.
MBASchooled: What did you do prior to business school, and what are you hoping to do after?
Prior to business school, I worked in research and technology consulting firms in Washington, D.C. that focused on the global healthcare and higher education sectors. On a lot of nights and weekends, I was also running an education startup I co-founded that provided professional development services to the international volunteer sector.
After graduation, I’ll be working for one of Google’s People Operations (human resources) teams as a program manager in one of their San Francisco Bay Area offices.
MBASchooled: What did you decide to recruit for during your first year, and why did you choose that industry/function?
I decided to recruit for human capital strategy – internally within the HR departments of several companies and externally at consulting firms that had clients who had human capital-related problems. I chose this focus because I kept on seeing signs that I needed to move my career in this direction.
My last job before business school was at an education consulting firm in Washington, D.C. called EAB. There, I worked on a strategy and operations team that supported a suite of student success platforms, or technology products that could help students navigate college. The day-to-day work was personally meaningful, but I realized one day that I loved the “people” and “process” elements of my job more than the “product.”
While working at EAB, I also helped run an employee resource group for people of color. I wrote and facilitated many professional development workshops to help emerging leaders of color find their voices at the company. We worked on professional branding, internal networking, resume development, and negotiation strategies. Due to this work, I was invited to sit on an executive working group that was tasked with shaping the company’s overall culture and employee engagement strategy.
I found so much energy from doing this type of work that, one day, my manager noticed and asked if I had considered working for HR. I hadn’t at that point, but later on, I was able to help my own technology consulting division by eventually redesigning the entire department’s onboarding program. Soon after, I was figuring out how to bring on new consultants, data scientists, and business analysts into our technology division. By the time I left for business school, several cohorts of new employees had successfully gone through the program I designed.
MBASchooled: What resources, programs, experiences etc were most helpful to you as you identified your career path?
I tried on a lot of different roles early on in my career as a way of learning what I liked and didn’t like in a job. Within the two consulting firms and startup I worked for prior to business school, I had jobs in sales and marketing, product development, training and development, data analytics, and technical project management. I later learned I’m attracted to startup-like teams within larger organizations, and I love working in new roles for a company.
I’ve also found a lot of support in the communities I have been a part of, like the StartingBloc Social Innovation Fellowship. It is a global network of leaders who are looking to create social innovation across sectors. I’ve actually found a number of lifelong friends and mentors in the community. Every time I’ve felt “stuck” in my career, I’ve been able to find someone within the community to help me think through how things could be.
For my MBA application journey, one-on-one conversations and general coffee chats have been tremendously helpful. The first time I heard about the value of an MBA was during a coffee chat in February 2015 with a career advisor at American University. He was able to explain to me how he became more effective in his work with the skills he got from an MBA program. He encouraged me to apply in a couple years.
Later that year, I found out about the Forté Foundation at a school fair. Forté’s mission today is to increase the number of women in management. Little did I know then how much this community would affect my career path. Forté has a program that’s called MBALaunch, and it’s a 10-month prep program to help women prepare for the MBA application process.
It was through this program that I also learned about the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, a network of top business schools and companies that want to increase the number of underrepresented minorities in business. I was pretty lucky that one of my MBALaunch coaches was a Consortium Fellow when she was in school, and with her support, I too became a Forté and Consortium Fellow at Georgetown in 2018. I ultimately wanted to be at a global school that had strong commitments to diversity and inclusion and public service. I felt that the fellowships signaled those commitments.
MBASchooled: As the VP of Career in the McDonough Student Government Association, what is your role and what are some of your responsibilities?
For all of 2019, I served as the Vice President of Career for the McDonough Student Government Association, and I mostly worked with the 500+ full-time students at the McDonough School of Business. While my successor has since taken over to serve for all of 2020, my main responsibility last year was to serve as a liaison between the MBA Career Center and the Student Government Association. On any given week, I’d raise any career-related concerns from my fellows students to the Center, share any data and information that my peers would find helpful, and organize events.
Some of my favorite initiatives included a school-wide, peer-to-peer networking event called Network & Chill; a LinkedIn workshop series called Level Up Your LinkedIn; a coffee chat “scramble” called McDonough Talks, where I’d pair random groups of students each week for networking; and a drop-in coaching event, with free snacks and fruit, called Don’t Go Bananas About Recruiting. I had a lot of fun putting together these events… and I guess a lot of puns!
MBASchooled: What do you enjoy most about your role as VP of Career?
I know this may sound cheesy, but it was the opportunity to be able to create some sort of impact for my classmates. I loved being able to solicit feedback from classmates about where they may have needed extra help in recruiting and create entire experiences that spoke to their needs.
While I was in the role, I came to realize how deeply personal each internship and full-time job search is to each person, yet there’s a lot of pressure in business school to conform to what the majority of the class is doing.
MBASchooled: What are some of the common challenges MBA students face when it comes to finding and building their careers, and how are you helping these students?
I think career clarification is huge, particularly for many full-time students who have joined the program to switch companies, industries, and/or functions. A lot of people – myself included at the beginning of the MBA program – are trying to figure out what they want from their MBA internships and/or post-MBA jobs and what is the first step to get there. Even though I’ve now moved on from the VP of Career role in Student Government, I still advise many of my peers as a Career Center Peer Advisor, or a second-year student career coach, and career clarification is a popular topic.
I also work with a lot of international students. Some people I’ve worked with are focusing on building their confidence in American-style interviews. For a lot of these folks, it’s their first time ever going through an American-style job interview process. I’ve realized I’ve been able to relate with my international classmates on some level because I grew up partly in the Philippines and partly in the States.
MBASchooled: What guidance or advice do you have for prospective MBA students as they think about their own career goals?
First, lean on your network, and find communities that can uplift you. There were a lot of highs and lows in my MBA application journey. At one point in the process, I was studying for my GMAT and starting to research business schools secretly at night and on weekends. In the background, one of my then-employers was going through an unexpected company sale. For about seven months in my journey, my own job security and that of my friends’ was on my mind. I’m not going to lie: it was a scary part of my life. I was anxious all the time. I definitely lost a lot of sleep over business school applications and the possibility of my work finding out about said applications when I didn’t feel like I had job security.
It was in these moments though that I leaned most on my family and friends in the StartingBloc and Forté MBALaunch communities. The networks, in particular, had a lot of people who knew what I was going through, and I was so appreciative of those moments when I felt heard after a pep talk or a brainstorming session of what I could do. No one in my family had ever gone down this road before, and there were a lot of moments when the stress and seeming isolation of applying to business school could have been a lot more intense, had it not been for those communities.
One day, I cried tears of joy in a secluded conference room at work when I heard that I received a full-tuition Consortium scholarship to Georgetown University. My first phone call was to my mom. My second phone call was to someone I had met in one of these communities and who had coached me throughout the process. I don’t even remember what happened during the work meeting that took place about fifteen minutes later because, at that moment, I felt overwhelmingly full of gratitude and relief.
And this has been a lesson I’ve carried into business school. I met my best friend during the first quarter of my business school experience. I have been grateful to have had her, my partner, and a circle of amazing business school classmates when juggling classes, recruiting, and community obligations has been difficult.
Second, trust the process, and own your own career journey. You’re going to be where you’re meant to be, and have faith that the steps that you take to further your personal and professional growth will be rewarded. Your reward may not be in the form that you expected, but make the most of an opportunity that presents itself. As long as your own physical, mental, and financial health are okay, enjoy the growth opportunity that comes with each experience. I’ve said this to myself time and time again: during business school recruiting, internship recruiting, club leadership elections, and full-time job interviews. Breathe. It’s going to be okay