For Young Alumna, Networking Key to Landing Job

Chalko ’08 touts benefits of liberal arts, Holy Cross’ prebusiness program

For Emily Keeley Chalko, the road that led to her career was a textbook example of the benefits of networking.

While helping set up for a prebusiness program dinner during her senior year in 2008, Chalko got to meet the evening’s guest, Craig Cerretani ’79, a founding principal of Longfellow Financial, and received a personal invitation to the inaugural meeting of the Holy Cross Technology Group in Boston.

Meeting the group — Holy Cross alumni working in technological fields — was a wonderful opportunity for the tech-savvy Chalko. At the advice of Cerretani, Chalko had been in touch with Brian Beaupre ’04, a financial analyst at OpenAir, before the event. Once there, she made more contacts with alums working at the software company based in Boston. Following several job interviews, she signed on before winter break of her senior year.

Less than a year later, Chalko was on the other side of the table. She brought her knowledge and experience as an assistant presenter at this year’s Executive Leadership Workshop, held at Holy Cross during the first week of March. Along with Tom Brennan ’86, chief financial officer of OpenAir, she helped develop case studies and moderated the afternoon student discussion on the second day of the workshop.

Chalko’s success in landing a job was more than simply being at the right place at the right time. As David Chu, director of the Ciocca Office of Entrepreneurial Studies and prebusiness advisor, notes, “Opportunity always favors those who are prepared, and Emily certainly was.”

Chalko, a visual arts studio major and art history minor, was an active participant in the prebusiness program, as well as an attendee of the Holy Cross Executive Leadership Workshop in 2007. The workshop, which teaches students the fundamentals of starting and managing a business by “demystifying the process” as Chu says, helped fuel Chalko’s enthusiasm for the corporate world.

Additionally, the program helped allay some of Chalko’s fears over her “outsider” background as an art major. While she loved the diversity of her classes, she says, she “didn’t have the contacts to the business world the way some of my friends did.”

Despite coming from a different discipline than many of the workshop’s attendees, the program taught her to have confidence in her unique skill set, which was rewarded when her teammates for the week’s culminating exercise — a mock business-plan proposal — made her the chief executive officer of their fictitious company.

“It was at the Executive Leadership Workshop that I really found my stride,” says Chalko.

This increased confidence, in conjunction with her continuing involvement in the prebusiness program, earned Chalko the connections that helped her land a job at OpenAir. The company, which helps organizations streamline and manage their operations and assets, was co-founded by Brennan, and employs several Holy Cross alumni.

Chalko now works as a customer success associate, responsible for helping client businesses resolve the technical and systemic issues which reduce their productivity. These duties range from financial reporting and cost tracking, to project management and systems security. She was prepared for this wide range of tasks, Chalko says, by her multi-faceted experiences at Holy Cross.

“Even though I work with finances and computers,” she says, “the variety of experiences I had at Holy Cross prepared me to be a flexible and active participant at my job.”

In the current business world, Chalko explains, “you’ll find that you don’t always have total control over your job; so much of our economy can be automated and reduced to formulas right now. It’s important to be well-rounded and creative, and that’s why a liberal arts education is important. Personally, I’m proud and happy that I chose to major in art, which really expanded my horizons.”

For those reasons, Chalko is happy to return to Holy Cross and mentor students.

“These programs offer such great experiences, and they’re really fantastic ways to learn about the world of business.”

By Ross Weisman ’09

Related Information:

• Prebusiness program