By Sarah Hayes T’16
Sarah is a first year student at Tuck. Prior to Tuck, she worked in strategic planning at the Travelers Companies in Hartford, CT and as a management consultant at Accenture in Charlotte, NC. Sarah is from Guilford, CT and graduated with a bachelor of science from the University of Connecticut. Outside the classroom she enjoys cooking, yoga, and exploring the beautiful Upper Valley.
As T'16s turned in the last final exam of a very strenuous Fall A term, 18 of us only had a few minutes to breathe a sigh of relief before throwing our bags in the car and taking off for the first stop on the 2014 Tuck marketing trek!
While our classmates were busy celebrating our shared accomplishment of making it through the Fall A semester, we marketing trekkers fought traffic all the way down I-95 to visit another Ivy League college town: Princeton, NJ.
We were warmly welcomed upon arrival by our new friends from American pharmaceutical company Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS). We spent the evening getting to know some fellow Tuckies at Triumph Brewing Company in Downtown Princeton: Kris Hager T'10, his wife Hilda TP'10, and Shahan Rifat T'11. We were also lucky enough to meet and network with Kris and Shahan's co-workers who are also recent graduates of top MBA programs.
After a great night of food, drinks, and networking, we turned into our BMS-sponsored hotel rooms to rest up for our first day of company visits. We arrived at the Bristol-Myers Squibb offices at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning. We started our day off with coffee and a tour of the very impressive corporate campus. There was plenty of beautiful outdoor space as well as a health center, a gym, and even on-site daycare. We spent the remainder of the morning discussing internship opportunities, hearing directly from marketing leaders about their successful careers, and learning more about how being a marketer at BMS is different from traditional CPG marketing roles. We were thoroughly impressed and humbled by the incredible things we learned about BMS's innovative work as a biopharmaceutical company. Hearing about their efforts on developing traditional and biologic medications for diseases like cancer, HIV/AIDs, and Hepatitis C was inspirational.
When we left BMS, we caravanned into New York City to continue the rest of our trek. At this point, we were joined by the rest of our classmates and continued on a "choose your own adventure" marketing trek schedule. We visited the following companies:
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
We all had a great experience exploring the world of marketing—some of us for the very first time. We returned to Hanover with great leads on summer internships and new ideas about what types of jobs we want to explore or pursue in the future.