Getting Down to Business

Although it’s been claimed that the way to succeed in business as a woman is to just “go to Wellesley,” the path isn’t quite that simple. And despite a bevy of successful business alumnae, there have historically been few official offerings to help students and graduates on that path.

Until now.

“We knew for a long time that there were gaps in terms of financial literacy, in terms of entrepreneurship, in our programming and knowledge for students about different pathways that they could pursue,” says Jen Pollard, Lulu Chow Wang ’66 Associate Provost and Executive Director of the Lulu Chow Wang ’66 Center for Career Education. Now, Wellesley is taking steps to remedy these programmatic gaps.

Last fall, Career Education launched its BEAM initiative, covering business, entrepreneurship, and money management with a portfolio of programs and undertakings that aim to help students and alumnae in these areas. That encompassing initiative was preceded by a critical development: the creation of a new endowed position, thanks to a gift from Lois Juliber ’71, retired vice chair and former chief operating officer of Colgate-Palmolive, Wellesley College trustee emerita, founding member of Wellesley’s Business Leadership Council, and Alumnae Achievement Award and Syrena Stackpole Award recipient. In fall 2023, the College began its search for Career Education’s first director for business, entrepreneurship, and financial empowerment.

Finding the right leader

“We ran a national search and were looking for people really who had experience outside of academia … but could also relate to and understand the student experience and what college student development was like,” says Pollard. Part of the role would be determining what exactly students and alumnae needed in these three areas. “From the very beginning, we brainstormed with Lois and said, ‘Let’s put our minds together and think about how could we meet these needs with a portfolio of programs under a new initiative that would have a strong leader at the helm to be able to move these areas forward,’” Pollard says.

In February 2024, Casey Hurley became the Lois D. Juliber ’71 Director for Business, Entrepreneurship, and Financial Empowerment. Hurley has worked at the College since 2021, when he joined Career Education as an advisor for students interested in careers in business, consulting, finance, and marketing. “We had a lot of interesting candidates. But [Hurley] stood out because he had come from industry but had spent several years in the career center at Wellesley advising students. He was very entrepreneurial by nature, and the idea of taking on a role with very little defined from the get-go and working with Lois [Juliber] and with myself on imagining what this could be—that wasn’t scary to him, it was energizing,” Pollard says.

Before coming to Wellesley, Hurley worked at State Street Bank in Boston for seven years; part of his work there included being in charge of creating small new entrepreneurial ventures. While he enjoyed the one-on-one work with students in his advisor role at the College, the new position holds other draws for Hurley, from the entrepreneurial and supportive culture that he credits Pollard with cultivating at Career Education to the opportunity to create something new and lasting. “Working with students for about two and a half years, I saw that a gap in our offerings did exist,” he says. “The director role for this new initiative was a way to make a lasting impact in a different way, while also staying connected to students.”

The vision

Although much of the specifics of the role were undefined, the guiding ideas for what the directorship could bring to campus, including what has become the BEAM initiative, were there from the start. “It was a true partnership with [Juliber] from the very beginning,” Pollard says. “For [Juliber], it was all about really seeing her alma mater invest in business in a way that I think she wished it had decades ago.” For Hurley, the task is now taking that vision and turning it into programs and connections that help students just starting on their career paths, and alumnae who are more established—or taking a new path themselves.

“The leadership position at the moment is defining what this program will be, and then figuring out a rollout and pilot strategy over the next three to five years to make it happen,” Pollard says. Although some projects are already in the works, Hurley’s first commitment is a seemingly simple one: listening. “I’m getting out into the alum community, into the business community, into the Wellesley community, and figuring out what [the program] should be right now. I think probably the biggest challenge is where to start,” Hurley says. “I’ve been doing as much of a listening tour as I can, meeting with as many alums as I can get in front of, and I will continue to do that, because the goal is to make this Wellesley-centric.”

Last fall, Hurley visited the San Francisco area as part of that listening tour and met with local alums who are involved in entrepreneurship in some form. But it wasn’t just Hurley who was listening; the reception he hosted also provided a space for alumnae to meet and listen to each other. One alumna was becoming an entrepreneur for the first time after a career switch. “She had some interesting conversations with fellow alums at the table, who had lots of different flavors of entrepreneurship in their toolkits. And that was a great use case for what this could be,” Hurley says. “And what we hope it will be is a kind of meeting place, virtual or otherwise, for these conversations.”

Expanding and crafting new programming

But Hurley and the Career Education team haven’t just been researching and listening—they’ve already begun to implement a number of different programs on campus, and more are in the planning stages. At its core, the BEAM initiative is “a portfolio of co-curricular programs focused on experiential learning activities,” Hurley says. It has two main areas at present: “It’s skill-building and preparation for challenging career paths. And then alum engagement and recognition,” he adds.

One of the star programs of the initiative is Upskill, a week-long skill intensive that takes place during Wintersession. This January marked the third year of the program, and it’s grown steadily since the first year, which featured two options (or tracks): investment banking or entrepreneurship. This past Wintersession offered five tracks for students to choose from: investment banking, entrepreneurship, coding careers, medical professions, and journalism. The week-long immersive experience allows students to learn skills critical for their chosen field—and to explore whether or not that field is right for them.

Lauren Skolaris ’25 took part in the first Upskill intensive during her sophomore year. Although she was already interested in business, she wasn’t sure if investment banking was the right career choice for her. “I thought that this would give me that background to see if this is a career that I could see myself pursuing, especially with the early recruiting time-line,” she says. (Investment banking at that time began the recruiting process in the spring of students’ sophomore year; the process now begins even earlier, in the fall of sophomore year.) Over the course of the week, Skolaris and her cohort went through two days of Wall Street prep, met with professionals working across the field to network and learn about their experiences, and then had on-site visits to Boston-area investment banking firms. What she learned that week—and perhaps more importantly, who she met—has had a lasting impact. After visiting Canaccord Genuity and talking with a woman working there, Skolaris decided to apply for an internship, which she got, and which led to an offer for a full-time position after she graduates this spring. “I didn’t know of Canaccord before the program,” she says. “So it ended up working out perfectly for me doing Upskill.”

Although not every Upskill intensive ends in a job offer, each track offers students insights into a chosen field, whether that’s learning how to work within the confines of a coding interview or creating a business proposal. While most tracks are on campus (at no additional cost to students; housing and meals are provided), this year’s new journalism track partnered with the Albright Institute and the Center for Strategic and International Studies and took students to Washington, D.C., to get hands-on experience in international journalism. In addition to the knowledge they gain from the program, students gain experiential learning credits toward the College’s new degree requirement. This year, the Upskill program had room for 80 students across the five tracks, and Career Education received more than 200 applications for those slots. “We have seen that program really take off over the past three years, and grow and gain energy on our campus,” Pollard says.

Another critical piece of the BEAM initiative is financial literacy (or, in the acronym’s parlance, money management). “We want to reach all students throughout their four years and make it part of the Wellesley experience,” Hurley says. The Make It Make Cents program is in its infancy, but the goal is to create a four-year financial-literacy curriculum that will help students navigate everything from budgeting and credit management to retirement accounts, investing, and more. “I feel like we have a deep responsibility when we recruit a diverse student body to make sure when they leave here, they can have a financially stable future, no matter what field they want to enter,” Pollard says. Bringing financial wellness experts to campus, like a program last fall featuring Ariel Nathanson ’10, founder of Finances for Feminists, will give students the opportunity to learn and ask questions about various financial considerations. Hurley is also working on providing self-paced learning modules for students and alums alike. “The thing about financial literacy and financial wellness is that it applies to everybody,” Hurley says. “We use the term ‘financial empowerment’ a lot. This is certainly not investing or how-to-get-rich training. It’s: How do I make responsible decisions and set myself up to have options.”

Collaborating with students and alumnae

For the Career Education team, a vital theme runs through all of the programs already underway or merely in the works: collaboration. The BEAM initiative started by collaborating with Juliber, and Hurley intends to follow along that path by working closely with students and alumnae not only to learn what each constituency wants and needs, but also to partner with them and support their own undertakings.

Hurley has already begun working closely with the many student organizations on campus that have been creating their own programming to fill the gaps in Wellesley’s offerings, from organizations like WeStart (an entrepreneurship club) and the Wellesley Blue Angels (a venture capital and entrepreneurship club) to Wellesley in Business. “In terms of entrepreneurship, that’s one of the areas where there is a lot of student activity on campus, and right now, my main goal is to amplify and support that activity,” Hurley says.

Vivien Wai Wai ’25 is a co-president of WeStart, and she’s been interested in entrepreneurship since she started a small online business in high school. “Wellesley has a lot of people who are extremely talented and hardworking. But there’s not enough exposure to entrepreneurship,” she says. WeStart organizes speaker panels and field trips to events like Boston University’s IDEA Con or places like the Harvard Innovation Labs. The organization also does co-working events to give students “the opportunity to work on something they’re passionate about outside of academics,” Wai Wai says. Since Hurley has come on as director, he’s been sharing information about events, as well as resources to help students attend them, and is working with WeStart to provide events on campus.

In addition to her work with WeStart, Wai Wai has been working on a startup idea with a friend, but after attending a pitch competition, the question was: Now what? Students in her position have questions on everything from incorporation to intellectual property rights, and that’s where Wai Wai thinks a more organized Wellesley network will help. “I think those are the kind of things [where] students require more personalized feedback, or maybe alum support,” she says. “We reached out. We did a whole dig in through LinkedIn and everything, finding people who are working in similar industries and reaching out and trying to get them to be on the advisory board. But that’s a process that requires a lot of initiative and sometimes luck.”

One way Career Education is looking to address some of the gaps in alumnae engagement is through the new signature BEAM event, the Wellesley in Business Symposium. Launching in fall 2025, this annual symposium aims to bring alums back to campus while also giving students an opportunity to explore various aspects of the business world. Career Education is partnering with Wellesley’s Business Leadership Council on the event, and which Pollard and Hurley anticipate will include keynote speakers, case studies for student teams, opportunities for alumnae mentorship, and a featured employer each year. “It’s a real multifaceted program, but the goal is to bring alums and students together to celebrate our presence in business while also broadening the perspective and definition of what our students think about when they think about the business world,” Pollard says. “We really see it as a gift to the Wellesley community at large.”

Hurley is working on putting together an entrepreneurship newsletter for students and alumnae to highlight alumnae achievements and what’s happening on campus, as well as to help create a community in that space.

“It’s a good moment for Wellesley to recognize a lot of the achievements of the alum community and combine that with satisfying a request that we hear a lot from alums—‘How can I help? What can I do for students?’ And we hope to solve both of those problems with this initiative,” Hurley says. “I hope that alums will reach out when they read this and say, ‘I can help.’”