00:00:00
Lally School of Management Student Panel
Grace Peckham
05:58:07 PM
I can hear you!
You know, recycle it on the upper top. And so don't worry about that. I'll help you. I'll help manage that.
Jeanine Thompson
06:00:04 PM
Hello and Welcome to The Lally Webinar! My name is Jeanine Thompson and I one of the Assistant Directors of Admissions here at Rensselaer. A few tips as we move forward this evening. QUESTIONS: Type questions in the chat at any point during the session. The chat is moderated, so you may not see it come up right away. We DO see it and will answer in the chat or out loud at the end of the session. Please do NOT send your question more than once as this makes it more difficult to get through all of the questions. TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES: If you are having any difficulties seeing or hearing our presenters, please: 1) Be sure that you are using Chrome or Firefox 2) Refresh your browser 3) Completely close out of the webinar and click on the link from your email to re-enter. Thank you
Hello everyone, welcome to the Lally School of Management student panel tonight. I'm so excited. Uh, we had 14 people sign up and it looks like we're gonna have a nice group of people here today.
Uh, with me, uh, my name is Janine Thompson. I'm an assistant director at admissions. And with me I have Kevin Fletcher. Fletcher, he is, uh, with Lowey, he's the director of undergraduate programs. He'll tell you more about himself. And then we have, uh, four students today.
You'll be able to speak with and we also have Linda Holt from the School of Business, so.
Just so we stay on schedule, I'm going to hand this over now to Doctor Fletcher.
OK, great. For the students who are here on the panel. So it's we see Grace and I see Jack and Jacob and I think there's one more coming in you'll have to click on. There you go. Perfect live. So we can we can have you up here. My the idea behind this tonight for those who are chiming in. First of all, I'd love to in the chat for the for the student participants, those who are here to kind of learn a little bit more about RPI, if you could put just the city and state that you're coming from.
I always love to see kind of where everybody's where everybody's going to, you know, kind of kind of coming in from.
Brayan T.
06:01:56 PM
Danbury CT
Jorge H.
06:02:02 PM
Stamford, Connecticut
Jacob Fuhr
06:02:09 PM
Hi everyone! I am originally from Morristown, New Jersey
Michael L.
06:02:10 PM
Larchmont, NY
I got a quick little dog and pony PowerPoint show just to kind of go over some things, maybe remind you why you applied and, and we're considering FBI in the 1st place. But really the bulk of tonight is to hear from our the students who are currently here at RPI, who've been really gracious enough in an already busy part of the semester to kind of jump on here for half an hour and just talk a little bit about their experiences. And we'll kind of go from there. If you have questions along the way, you know, feel free to put them in the chat. I think Janine will be monitoring this and we'll go from there.
OK. Let me just see if we can make sure we're doing this right. I think we have a little bit of a here we go.
All right. I think for the sake of time, what I'd love to do is just to kind of talk a little bit about why Lally. I want to talk about the process of kind of what an education at the Lally School of Management and RPI is all about. Have you have us kind of remind ourselves why we're thinking about coming here as the students who are on here will talk about, we have a real nice, very high, highly qualified faculty who do research but also teach classes. The class sizes themselves are fairly small, kind of an overall 12:50 ratio or so.
Have a lot of assets here on campus.
From our impact theater to our quantum computer to a number of new access databases from our open chat AI, ChatGPT service that we're getting Bloomberg S and PA lot of services and assets that we have access to not only as faculty but as students. And so that's a big part of what coming to to RPI is all about. Probably the thing that one of the biggest questions that I get in my role and again, my role is as the director of undergraduate programs and also a professor of practice in the Lilly School is around the academic side of things and so.
Looking at students coming in and I'm trying to help them think about, OK, over the next four years, what's the totality of your experience here at RPI going to be? And then when you're leaving the door, we want you as successful and happy alums in whatever careers you choose. And so we certainly have had over the last, you know, our, our main programs that we offer, our business and management program and our business analytics program. We're really excited about the fact that we have just gotten 2 new Bachelors of science programs just approved by New York State, our marketing and advanced computer program and then our finance markets and emerging.
Program, this will add a kind of new dimension to what students can look to do within Lally as a part of just a Lally degree program. And maybe kind of build on to that is the fact that a large percentage it's growing about 1/3. And I'm third and kind of growing up to almost 1/2 of the students who graduate from RPI and from the LA school end up graduating with what's known as a dual degree. And in essence, and I think we got a few dual degrees here on that we can talk about the idea is that out of all the different degree programs that RPI offers.
There are a number that really make a lot of sense to pair up with one of our business programs. And so you'll come in as a business major. The basic processes will work with you on advising to get you in your first classes that you need for the fall. But then if you're interested in pursuing a dual degree, we will work with you to get that as a part of your formal degree plan. We have specialized advising templates so that you can get through in four years in those degrees. And we've got a lot of really interesting and cool degrees you can walk out of here if you're really interested in kind of sustainability, maybe working for a sustainability program.
Part of a Fortune 500 or a think tank or a non profit. We have a great degree between our business and management, sustainability studies. A lot of students who are interested in various aspects of marketing might decide to pair it with communications, media and design. Uh, we have a lot of students who are interested in the business side of gaming. So we have a great, uh, games and simulations art sciences program here on campus. And when you, when you put that together with a business degree, uh, you're gonna be on that kind of the, the financial side, the business side, the marketing side of, of, of getting into the games industry. So that gives you a little bit more of an opportunity to do that.
Umm, we also have a number of dual degrees that we offer with the school of science and the school of engineering. Uh, we have a couple of degree programs with the, uh, information technology and web sciences programs, which are really a nice pairing because you're getting access to not only like our business analytics program, uh, but also web sciences, IT sort of area, Uh, a lot of things you can do with that degree, uh, get into cyber security, chief information officer, all sorts of things you can walk out of the door here doing same with the business analytics and mathematics degree. So a lot of opportunities that you can, you can kind of fit.
Pair science and engineering degrees with one of our business degrees. So even if you're not thinking right away about a dual degree and you certainly do not need to come in here, as I said, well over half of our students graduate with a single degree in, in Lally. And that's perfectly fine, perfectly acceptable. And you'll, you'll do really well in in a career by doing that. But if you want to marry some of these degrees together, we already have kind of a preset plan for how to, how to make that happen. Then we have really interesting ones like chemical engineering and other things that we can have. Jacob Shaking said. We can talk about as well if you're really bold, but there's a lot of really interesting things you could do with these.
These dual degrees that kind of add to your or, you know, add value. One of the things that I'm most proud about, umm, as an undergrad or program director and one of the things that I focus on quite a bit is the beyond books component of your education, right? So you're going to take classes with great faculty in a small setting, uh, learn about, uh, learn a lot about the theory and practice of, you know, the marketing, uh, field finance, uh, strategy, information technology, you name it. But then we pair that with lots of different opportunities you have as a student to get involved with real world projects.
Might be projects we're bringing into the classroom that might be research opportunities you jump into as a part of our undergraduate research program. That might be capstone projects within classes. Every student in LA is required to do at least one internship. Oftentimes students are doing more than one. And we work with you and we work with the Center for Career and Professional Development to find those great internship opportunities. Many of them turn into career opportunities. That's kind of the idea. And then we have really active student clubs. Umm, one of the things that I'm sure Grace will talk about is our rents are finance club, so I won't spend a lot of time on that.
Jeanine Thompson
06:08:37 PM
Hello Lally Accepted Students and ITWS and MGTE Accepted Students! If you have a question, please type it here and we will answer it for you!!
We have a newly started consultancy club and we have a real exciting kind of list of things we're going to be doing with the consultancy club. We have our Lally management and marketing student Association, and we have women in business, real active group of students that are looking at it from the perspective of women working in different business fields. And so there's a lot of things within the club environment that really allows for you as a student to kind of flourish and build on what you're learning in the classroom and then apply it into those real world settings, if you will.
I would be remiss if I didn't talk a little bit about the idea that.
Even as a freshman and sophomore, you should know that you have the opportunities to do accelerated programs into our graduate programs.
We have a large percentage of our students that continue on within our Masters of Science and our MBA programs. We've just done some structural changes to both programs to allow.
For students to get out of here, out of RPI within a year in those programs, right? So you're able to really kind of fast track from a Bachelor of Science to a masters program in a way that that makes a lot of sense. OK, I could spend a lot of time on this one. So for me as both an instructor, as a administrator in the program, but also as a parent of students who are in college right now, return on investment is important. I want to know what's going to happen with the degrees that students get and they're getting a return. Some of these numbers are actually dated that the 2022 grads that we surveyed were averaging around.
5000 out of the gate, we had some early numbers from 2023 grads that are north of 80,000, really exciting. Those numbers are well over 33% higher than the national average for students that are graduating the business degree, right? So there's a return on investment there. We just actually uncovered some really interesting findings that that are really kind of exciting. New York Times has a database that it looks at kind of the financial performance of students coming out of different schools. The median student income for 34 year olds, RPI students, graduates ranked second in the country in terms of their overall median salary.
From from RPI and the same with the Mobility index, which measures the ability for students to jump from different.
Kind of income levels or pay scales. Again, RPI is number 2 in the country behind only UCLA and Georgetown in the first list. So the ROI is really important to us. And we're getting a lot of great information to show that our students, our graduates, our alums are doing a really terrific job when it comes to getting that return on investment for, for their degree. Lots of different fields that our students go into. We work real hard on building those kind of hard skills from coding and Python And learning our, to the durable skills of leadership and communication and teamwork, right? Those are the things that you have to take with you.
Anywhere you go in any job that you have lots of opportunities outside of Lally on the campus and the community, uh, we're tucked in kind of within a driving distance from Montreal to Boston, NY, access to the Adirondacks access, access to the Catskills. Although in the last couple days when it was really cold and snowy, probably most people weren't necessarily going out of their way to get there. But if you're a skier, there's an opportunity for that as well. So there's a lot of really interesting things that we can do even outside of the RPI, uh, campus, uh, that, that helps to build kind of your experiences here as well. So what I'd love to do.
Now kind of without any further ado and we'll pitch any questions you want in the chat. And as we start going through and kind of introducing the students here that are going to talk to you about your experiences, I'm also happy kind of at the end of that to answer any specific questions that our prospective students have as well. Maybe what I'll do is, I think the easiest way to do this, we have Grace and Jacob and Jack and Jesse on here. And I'll have each of you just kind of introduce yourself, kind of your name, what your major is, what your year is, and a couple of you are getting close to it, if not already.
And and then I'll kind of pitch out some questions. You can turn your mics on. Hopefully we'll we won't have to go kind of one at a time.
And maybe we'll start with Grace, if you could just give us a little bit about who you are.
Hi everybody, My name is Grace. I'm originally from Tiverton, RI. I'm a junior in the business Analytics program. Outside of academics, I'm currently serving as president of the Finance Club. I'm also a member of the Student Managed Investment Fund. And then outside of school, I'm a big skier, so I work ski patrol during the winter.
Awesome, That's awesome. Great. Who wants to go next?
Jacob.
Are you coming from us, from the bowels of an academic building right now?
I got you. OK. You're doing double duty then. That's great. All right, Jack, go ahead.
Yeah. Hi, everyone. My name is Jack Ellis. I'm a senior here at RPI. I'm originally from New Canaan, CT I'm a member of RPI's baseball team here. I'm a pitcher. We actually have practice going on in like 15 minutes, so I'm gonna head straight from here to practice. And then I'm also a member of the O of the Zeta Cy fraternity here on campus. So little Greek life as long as as well as sports and. Yeah.
Awesome. And last but not least.
Oh, you're muted?
OK.
We'll, we'll, we'll fast track this a little bit then if that's OK and we can, we can kind of see if you can play with it as you get going or what I, what I'd like to do. I'm going to kind of change it up a little bit. We got to get Jack to practice right. So, So what I thought we would do, I, I sent everybody just a little bit behind the scenes here. I sent everybody on our student panel a bunch of questions I'm going to ask and we'll kind of go back and forth. But I want to make sure Jack has a chance to kind of answer all the questions kind of a rapid fire real quick. And then you can stay as long as you can, Jack. And, and then we'll just kind of go back and forth with, with the three or four of us. We can get your mic going as well.
Jack, so tell us a little bit some of the questions I thought would be useful for the folks who are on kind of listening and learning a little bit more about RPI. Was I asked each of you to kind of think about a couple of the best experiences you've had within in a classroom, a couple of best experiences outside of the classroom, things you've enjoyed doing, what it's like to be at RPI. What's difficult or challenging? I mean, this is, this is a rigorous school. It's intended to be rigorous and we're all kind of in it together when it comes to the rigor, but we'd love to hear kind of your experience on that. And then just any recommendations or thoughts to the the attendees here who are kind of making the decision.
To finally decide to just come to RPI and come to Lally, go ahead, Jack.
Of course. So I think mainly speaking.
I when I decide I want to come RPI, one of the biggest reasons for that was the fact that I knew as a business major that I could take the classes that I wanted to take within the business and economics environment too. I come from a very like analytical background. I think it kind of attributes to that with my love for baseball. So I wanted to take as many like math and statistics classes that I could or like econometric classes that I could take. So this is so.
Me being able to do business at a tech oriented school allowed me to stick to more STEM based classes rather than kind of that humanity stuff too, which I know some PEO some people are definitely interested in. And there you have the ability to take a Haas classes, Haas as your humanities umm department that is different from umm Lally, but you have the opportunity to take some of those humanities classes that you would that you would like to take as well.
Or if you would rather just stay with STEM, then you can take STEM classes. So basically you're able to kind of choose your own adventure, like choose the route that you want to take in order to get your degree and make the most out of your time here at school. I think, umm, to answer another question, umm, one of the, uh, one of my favorite uh, parts or like classes and stuff that I took here at RPI was the quantitative methods class that I took last semester.
Umm, I think you guys could probably understand uh, given my highly analytical background.
Brayan T.
06:18:26 PM
What are the dual degrees that include engineering and business? What are the options for dual degrees?
I found, uh, the content that we learn and the quanti, the quant type of, uh, stuff very interesting to me and I was able to, uh, get gain the knowledge in that field a lot quicker than I would in a potent. And like one of the other management classes that are a little more conceptual, uh, based as I kinda, I, I enjoyed completing the math a little a little more. So that's just one, one personal thing. But there were a lot of projects and stuff kind of, umm, where we had.
Analyze, umm, real world experiences with real world, uh, companies and, umm, create, uh, an analytical model, uh, in order to solve an issue with that. So I found that very interesting.
Great. And what's what's, what's your experience you obviously are involved in in baseball and some other things going on. What's your experience been like as a student here at RPI?
Jorge H.
06:19:07 PM
Is there anything I need to know or prepare for before freshman year classes?
Yeah, so it's been great. I think being an athlete, it really has socially put me in a great group of individuals that I see every single day, whether it's at lift, at practice or umm, I live with a bunch of guys on my team too. So I I'm able to hang out with them every day. And then and then with practice, with lift, I'm able to keep myself on a strict schedule, which is great. And I'm able allows myself to get ahead on assignments, keep up with.
Deadlines, which is a big part of college. Like you're gonna have to manage your time with everything you have going on. And baseball has kind of forced that into my lifestyle and allowed for me to effectively do that. I'm someone that does really well when they're on a schedule and they kind of budget time in specific ways. So I was able to do that to the best of my ability, which is something I recommend for everyone coming here.
Let me let me broaden this a little bit. We'll go Grayson and Jacob and if Michael's working, we'll try one one other time. Just again, kind of reiterating maybe a couple experiences both in the class and outside of the classroom that you've had that that you've kind of reflected on as a junior and you Jacob is getting ready to graduate and kind of bringing you to where you're at this point.
Yeah, there's two classes that really come to mind for me. So one was actually pretty recent, last semester I took in operations class, umm, and in that class we kind of covered a lot of different project management, supply chain, umm, but the professor really focused on like how you could apply these to real world like jobs, internships. And one of the internship opportunities that professor brought about was Target has some distribution centers in upstate New York that.
I wasn't really aware of, but supply chain is something that I'm interested in. So after completing that course, I reached out to the professor to see if he could put me in contact with any RPI alum that work at Target, UMM, and like help me to like move forward in the interview process and all of that. And it did work out. Umm, So that's a huge thing that I really benefited from was one, that being mentioned in class and two, that professor was super willing to help me.
Awesome.
As well as just the alum was just like an awesome experience. So that's where I'll be interning for the summer. And another class that comes to mind for me is I'm also interested in entrepreneurship. And I know that's one of the minors that Lally has. So one of the classes that I took was.
Iie I forget the full name of it.
Invention, innovation, and entrepreneurship.
Yeah, umm, and that class was essentially an incubator, Umm, And I find with like a lot of the classes in the Lally school, the projects that you're working on, you can take them as serious as, as you want them to be. So if you wanted to just be a class project, then that's OK. But if you want to make it something real, you have the full ability to do that and have the resources. So if you were working on a, a startup or a business in that class, you had the potential to bring that to life.
Post that class as well and that really sticks out to me.
2 two things to build on before we get to take a bomb. One is the alum. I'm glad you mentioned that, umm, you know, RPI is 200 years old, a Lally school technically goes back 100 years, 60 depending on who you're talking to. We got a really deep bench of alums and we've been doing a really good job in really reconnecting with alums and making those alumni connections pay off for, for students. And so that's certainly a big, big attribute those, those alums who are in that pool of, of people I talked about who are now doing very well in, in the workplace, right? So that's 1/2 on the entrepreneurship side. There's a lot of really fun things going on right now, uh, within entrepreneurship.
Obviously we have a minor in classes and curriculum around entrepreneurship, but RPI is also committed to really building that entrepreneurship space to the point now where they're, you know, folks, students are having opportunities to actually intern within startup companies that are connected to RP is new incubator and accelerator centers. And so there's a lot of really interesting things if you're really interested in the startup sort of community, there's a lot of good things that are going on RPI as well. So Jacob.
Very cool, it's easy. Is your mic working?
Uh, can you guys hear me?
Yes.
Yes, we're in business. Great. All right, how about your turn a little bit about some classes then I'll then I'll take a quick pause and answer a couple quick student questions that are in the chat. So.
OK, umm, I'm gonna go a little bit of a different route. So, umm, it's not a class in the Business School in particular, but umm, as you guys know, RP is a STEM focus school and we have to take computer science, uh, so learning coding and Python And.
I decided to take it at RPI, which is probably the most difficult option, but I did that in order to give myself the opportunity to take as many internships as I could in my years in the summer. So while taking that course at our at at RPI was probably one of the more challenging course I've ever taken. But that's partly why I came to RPI and why I like RPI is that it's RPI is going to challenge you and put you in a better position in the future to learn and adapt.
And then right now I'm actually really enjoying my quantitative methods course.
Mm-hmm.
We're going over different types of like linear modeling that can help you make decisions. And this past summer I entered at a startup company and I've kind of been thinking in the future I'd like to probably start my own company. And this class is really opening my eyes to different tools for making decisions. And I just think that's really cool and I can really see myself applying that in the future.
Awesome. No, that's great. You know, in a second I'm gonna ask all of you a little bit kind of building on what Jack said, kinda what it's like to be a student here. You just mentioned kind of it's, it's tough. There's sometimes some tough classes, but that's kind of the point you come here. And so think about that in a second. And then maybe in other things we haven't talked about. I'd love to hear a little more about the RFC, Love to hear more about what you've been doing, Jacob. But let me answer this question real quick from from Brian. What are the dual degrees including engineering and business? We're actually just finishing up and for the fall, we'll have a dual degree between this analytics and industrial management engineering through the engineering school.
Which is a nice kind of fit between the two. There's more information on the on the Lally website about dual degrees, but you can find me up on the website as well if you have specific questions about dual degrees and up to the point where I can show you what a four years will look like doing a dual degree, we have templates that kind of show you. Always feel free to reach out to me, send me an e-mail, and then maybe this can go to everyone on the panel here. Is there anything I need to know or prepare for before freshman year classes? I'll pitch this to the student panel.
I can answer this one.
Any anything I need to know or prepare for before freshman year classes?
So I know one thing I did before this summer, the summer before I came my freshman year is I reached out. I was, I knew I was given an academic advisor and I reached out to her to try to schedule a meeting to kind of go over like a plan in my head of what I wanted to do with my four years looking at potential degrees. Like I was able to decide that I wanted to do a dual with economics in that meeting and then basically kind of just lay out like a like a four year plan, but.
Prioritizing those first two years and how to best structure my schedule knowing that I'm an, I'm an athlete and I wanted to, uh, take harder classes in the fall and then, or maybe even more classes in the fall than in the spring. So that's definitely one thing that I took advantage of, umm, of be before I came here just to almost seem more prepared than I would be like in my first couple weeks.
And a couple other comments before I get to it just real quick. The one thing about the Lally School of Management is we have full time advisors for students. And so you would be working with myself or Maggie Wright or Jackie, We have a number of people in our student services office that will work with you as a student all the way from your freshman year through your senior year and beyond, uh, in kind of advising classes and career advising, things like that. Uh, and so you'll have that support for sure. Other, other comments from our panel on things to do to prepare for freshman year. Think back, think back a few years ago when you were just getting ready to get to college. What would you kind of advice would you give?
Well, that's it right now.
Yep.
Doctor Fletcher, Oops, sorry, umm, yeah. Doctor Fletcher, I just had, I have to head out. I just wanted to say thank you and, uh, good luck to all, all of you, uh, prospecting students and your four years.
All right. Thank you so much.
Dave, thanks for taking the time. I really appreciate it. And you know, go get to work. Alright, sounds like it's easy. Do you have something to say?
Yeah, yeah, I can jump in here. So I would say that take advantage of the business degrees at RPI and their flexibility in allowing you to add dual majors and even.
Basically I also do, I also have a a psychological science major but I added that after my freshman year and I just realized that I really like my psychology classes and the reason I was able to do that was because I had started planning ahead the class that I would be taking for the next 4 years.
Like Jack did, and doing that allowed him to have several options, not just going to psychology. I was also considering adding economics degree. So plan ahead early and then do as many internships as you can. Even if you're a freshman, still go to the career fairs. It gets you valuable learning experience just speaking to people. So those would be two things I would say to do.
That's great, Great advice, Grace Jacob.
Yeah, I think one other piece of advice that I would add in more like academics focus is if you're going into a degree, like if you're interested in economics major, the business analytics, umm, and for the management as well, umm, you've kind of heard us talk about some of our really tough classes, those being the computer science as well as umm, a series of like calculus classes that you have to take.
OK.
So my piece of advice, and this is what I did as a freshman that really helped me, was I saved all of my high school calculus notes. And I also just tried to like practice Python coding ahead of time or anything like that to try to at least get some like the basic understanding down. Because with those classes, those classes compared to like your business related classes, it's going to be much larger lectures.
Yep.
Umm, but they're gonna be a large portion of your time studying wise.
And we try a couple things. You know, there's obviously going to be Tasmania and there's going to be tutors for a lot of these classes. We even have a set of classes within the Lally school we know are kind of more of the challenging ones that we earmark some tutors for, you know, so there's, there's certainly academic support on that side of it. But but and, and the other sort of aspect of what we're how we advise a lot of times why we're creating these advising templates is so that you don't get computer science and calculus and some other ridiculous class all in the same semester. We're trying to kind of like spread it out because we know you might not, you got four classes, you're not spending.
Jeanine Thompson
06:31:41 PM
For anyone that has issues, just refresh and you will see everyone again!
5% of your time equally on all four classes probably, right? There's maybe a little bit of a proportionality to what you're going to be doing. And in the end, it all makes sense. It all kind of works in a way that makes sense. But that's a great bit of advice as well, Jacob.
It's great. And and just to kind of clarify, we've been hammered home the dual degrees a lot. The majority of our students do not graduate with dual degrees, right? So it's still still a majority. And there's a lot of ways you can kind of create, you know, a, a degree that's tailored to you a lot of different minors. You can take a lot of different concentrations within the major, a lot of different internship experiences that are also going to kind of inform what you do. I have questions sometimes where a student will come in and they say, Hey, I want a minor in this, but it doesn't exist. I said, well, then just take some classes in it and talk about on your resume and in your cover letter, how you focused in this area, right. So a lot of it is really trying to.
Is to your point, Jacob, as you're talking about how you're selling yourself with your degree once you do graduate with all the different sort of curricular and non curricular experiences that you've had that we've been able to kind of help package together. That's what's kind of kind of make the difference. So other thoughts or recommendations, I want to make sure I'm sensitive on time. I know this goes technically until 8:00, but if you're like me, you lose interest after about 1/2 an hour or anything. And so I want to make sure we're getting to the kind of core of what we want to, what we want to get to soon. And then open it up for any other questions from other folks around here, anything else that you would provide? Any other things that we didn't talk about?
Grace, I'd love to have you talk a little bit about the RFC as just kind of an example of a student run club. We have a number of student run clubs through LA, but then there are over 200 clubs, I think it's over 200, maybe more than that, that are run as a campus wide through the Union. And so there's a lot of different things that you can get into, uh, from uh, raising bees to fencing to finance to, you name it, a lot of different things. And so, uh, there's a lot of ways you kind of augment your experiences, But you know, if there's other things we didn't talk about, I'd love to spend that time now. And maybe we'll start with Grace to talk a little bit about the RFC as an example of that.
Yeah, so the finance club, umm, within the club we go over a bunch of different like professional finance geared items. So whether that's technical workshops, having alumni come onto campus or having guest speakers. And we try to bring on different alumni that work in different fields of finance, umm, as well as bringing potential recruiters on in the semester. We even have an on site trip planned with a local bank, which is super awesome.
Awesome.
Umm Outside of that, we also put together teams that participate in investment making competitions.
In the fall semester, we had a team participate in the national investment banking competition, which is across the US and Canada. In one of our teams actually qualified to go to the nationals. So they went and traveled to Vancouver and got to network and be a part of that experience. And a lot of it was supported by Lally, which was awesome. And then this semester we're participating. I'm also part of the team for that.
The Harvard case competition. So for that we're wrapping up a pitch book, which is what you would do if you were an actual investment banker. So getting that hands on experience.
Cam K.
06:36:24 PM
How popular is Entrepreneurship at RPI? Does RPI have a Entrepreneurship club?
And whether or not we qualify, we'll still be able to go visit Harvard's campus and be able to network with professionals, which is another thing that was sponsored and helped by Lally. A very exciting thing that we have going on at the end of the semester, which we try to do every year, is RPI alumni and Finance panel. So what we're doing for that is we're inviting about 50 alumni. We're hoping to capture about 30 of them to actually be able.
Come on campus to talk to students through a panel that will be hosting. And then after that a networking event, umm, and a part of that is really trying to get freshmen involved. So people that might not have that much, much experience, but really trying to connect you with alumni, UMM, getting you educated, prepared, and hopefully getting those internship offers.
Great. And you also have teams of students doing trades now, right?
Yes, that's another huge thing that we were very lucky to be able to work on this semester is Lally now has a student managed investment fund. So what that means is you're kind of playing the role as an analyst, but you're not really playing the role. You are actually in the role because students are getting that hands on experience with real money. That is a part of RP is endowment. There's only other a few other schools in the country that really give students this access.
I know one school that I was looking at when I was picking between RPI was Stevens Institute of Tech, which I think is a fairly comparable school, umm, that they also have a student managed investment fund, UMM So this was just huge for us to be able to be a part of.
Yeah, it's a lot of cool things going on the finance side as well. So Jacob, do you see anything else?
Awesome. Let me just chime in real quick. There was a question from a student Cam is asking about RPI entrepreneurship and and whether entrepreneurship has a club. Yes, they do. The Flying Pig Society is a is a club that's been going on for a little bit. There's a lot of sort of space. I know that there's actual kind of an incubator going on where there are a set of over a dozen startup companies started up by students who are meeting on a weekly basis to kind of continue to build their businesses.
Within this club structure as well, and so if that's what you something really interested in.
There's a space for you here and there's support both within Lally as well as the Severino Center for Entrepreneurship and RPI broadly for that as well. So.
It's easy.
Yeah, I can add in this sense, I think that RP is set up for you to expand and learn outside of the classroom. You're encouraged to do that with the different programs like the Severino Center, Flying Pig Society and also I don't know if you guys know about the arts program. I utilized my Arch away experience to intern at a start up company and I was given the opportunity through Arch to essentially create a performance evaluation for myself. I.
Set measurable goals for myself that I would try to achieve during my internship at a startup and in that environment you have to be a self starter. It's not usually your own small teams and.
One of the highlights of that was essentially I learned like basic customer relationship management just through that experience, not even in the classroom, and I really enjoyed it.
Awesome No, that's great. We're getting close to about 7:40, which is about 10 minutes over what the usual attention span is for, for these kinds of things. I'd love to if there's any other questions. I've been looking at the chat. I don't think there are at this point. Umm, let me just, uh, take a pause here. We had Jack leave already, but let me thank uh, exuberantly Grace and Jacob, it's easy for joining us tonight. I appreciate you guys a lot for coming in and kinda talking a little bit. Umm, if, if.
Have any questions that are around anything that you talked about You OK if I connect connect them with you if you if they have questions.
Yeah, and I'd just like to say if, uh, if you're still, uh, considering, uh, deciding on RPI or not, I would. And you haven't visited already, I'll highly encourage you to, umm, visiting a school is, is an important way you decide, umm, if it's the right place for you. I actually visited twice, so just to make sure, Yeah, yeah, just make sure.
Yeah.
Did, did you? Yeah, we have, we have. We have an event in March. Janine can jump in. I think it's March 21st and April 12th, 22nd.
Awesome.
Both both, you know, accepted student days and we got a lot of cool things planned around that around that day. If you come, you'll hear me talk, but you won't hear me say the same thing again. I promise you. I got a whole different thing set of things to sort of talk about. But a lot going on here at RPI, a lot going on in Lally. We have a there's a lot, there's an energy on campus that's kind of palpable. We got a new president, new Provost, a new Dean here in the school.
Really kind of re energize alumni base. This is a great time to come and be a student at RPI. And Full disclosure, I was a masters and PhD student at RPI many, many, many years ago and his alum has come back to to work within Lally again. And so that connection is there, as you know from a lung perspective. But if you have questions that that are kind of related to any of the things that our our student panel talked about today, if you have questions around the duels, if you want to see what a dual major template looks like.
My My contact information doctor Kevin Fletcher is on the website.
I'm sure we probably can follow up with you with my contact information following this, You know, if you have any direct questions. Hope to see you. Hope to see you. Go ahead, Jenny.
You can, oh you, you can add your, uh, contact information in the chat if you want. Yeah, that would make it super easy.
Kevin Fletcher
06:43:11 PM
fletck3@rpi.edu
Yep.
Yeah, I suppose I could do that, couldn't I? Yeah. And you know, to your point, we certainly hope that, I certainly hope I can see some of you in person, you know, in March and or April and happy to answer any questions there as well. I don't see any other information or any other questions in the chat. Anything that I missed, Janine?
Grace Peckham
06:43:31 PM
Feel free to reach out if you have any questions, peckhg@rpi.edu
Thank you, Doctor Fletcher and your fabulous dream team here tonight. I just think it was a wonderful presentation. I want to just invite all of our accepted students on this presentation to our accepted student celebrations. The first one is March 22nd. The second one is April 12th. This is a Saturday.
It's a terrific day. We will probably have 1500 people on campus of accepted students.
So it's exciting. We have a welcome session for Lowe, but the great thing is you get to actually tour the Pittsburgh building and get some nice swag from the Lally School, which is always the best. You also get a lunch and you get to hang out in our town for a day. So we would love to host you for a visit on either accepted student celebration and then I also would invite you to join.
Another webinar that we're hosting in April. It's April 14th on a Tuesday at 7:00 PM.
Jacob Fuhr
06:44:38 PM
Same here! fuhrj@rpi.edu or over LinkedIn
And our Dean, lead Wegman, will be presenting and he will, you know, take questions and whatnot. So please sign up for that webinar as well. We really appreciate everyone. I'll give you another minute in case you want to ask a question, but thank you everyone.
Great, thank you. All right, I'm going to let my, uh, our student panel go. Jacob, you gotta go back to make sure they're not jabbing people in places they shouldn't be. And, uh.
Michael L.
06:45:01 PM
Thank you!
And.
Really.
Cool.
Jorge H.
06:45:21 PM
Thank you!
Awesome. Awesome. That'll be cool. Alright, Thank you, guys. Appreciate it. Take care.
Thank you for the thank yous as well.
And I'll stay on for another minute or so just to make sure there's no any other questions from the participants. Looks like we have a few people logging off.
Yeah, I think we have everybody logging off. Thank you, Kevin. Awesome.
Awesome. Yes, bye, bye.
Video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOOPpuaoP0o