Elissa Ellis Sangster: Hello and welcome to our first Career Lab podcast. I’m Elissa Ellis, Director of the Forté Foundation. At our recent event in Los Angeles, a panel of business leaders spoke with our audience of undergrads about a career in business.

I came here because my friend invited me and she said it was going to be a lot of strong women. I’m a bit of a feminist, so I wanted to talk to some of the women that were here, find a relaxed environment where you could just talk to women on a one-on-one personal basis.

Talk about doing an MBA. It’s something that I had never considered before, but just the prospects of breaking into this field or even the fact that you can go straight out of school. It’s just something I didn’t know at all, so that was really interesting.

The one thing and the main thing that I hoped it would do is allow me to be able to compete with other individuals within a company, allow me to grow more.

Elissa: One of the surprising things that we heard from our speakers was that they couldn’t have guessed where their careers would take them.

Katherine Bair Desmond: I’m Katherine Bair Desmond. I’m the manager of Women’s Recruiting Initiatives for McKinsey & Company in North America. I was an English and Psychology major. When I was going into my senior year, I spent my summer doing marketing with Coca-Cola in Atlanta where I grew up, and had such a positive experience. Realized that actually business, which I’d always thought was just boring and what my dad did, actually might be really, really interesting. I’ve decided that, that was what I wanted to do after I graduated.

I definitely had not anticipated going into business and I don’t think I really understood what business was when I was in college. I went to a liberal arts school, I studied English Psychology and I spent my free time hanging out in the theater. It just wasn’t an area that I knew anything about. I think that first experience through that summer internship opened my eyes to the fact that actually business might be really exciting and there was so much I didn’t know about it, and so much I wanted to learn about it, that I decided I’d give it a go.

Elissa: Katherine wasn’t the only one who reported that her career path took her by surprise. Rodney Craig is the Director at Merrill Lynch Capital in the Healthcare Leveraged Finance Group. We asked Rodney whether he could have predicted where he would end up.

Rodney Craig: Never. I had no knowledge of investment banking really prior to my senior year at USC. I went to USC undergrad and I never would have guessed that I would wind up working at Merrill Lynch providing finance and for leveraged buyout, so it’s been a pretty good ride.

Elissa: Rodney also talked to our audience about his experience in business school.

Rodney: It was a lot of fun. It was a great group of people, it’s very competitive, a lot of very intelligent people. I think that it was probably the best two year of my life because I was more mature, I knew what I wanted to do going into business. Then, for me, business school validated my goals of going into finance, so it was a great experience for me.

Elissa: Eric Chamb