Within six months of graduation, 97% of Wellesley’s class of 2022 was employed, in school, or in military service, according to the College’s annual class destination survey. Jen Pollard, associate provost and executive director of Wellesley’s Career Education, is understandably proud of that statistic, but she stresses that it doesn’t show the whole picture.
“For Wellesley, it’s only part of the story,” she says. “We have brilliant students who come here wanting to do so many different things after they graduate. I think the number that really starts to illuminate the work that we do, is the percentage of students who are finding jobs that are allowing them to have a meaningful impact.” This number is high, too: 96.48% of recent graduates reported that they believe their work is meaningful.
Rachel Sih ’22 is one such alum. She is currently working at Warner Music and will be attending Harvard Law School in fall 2024 with a goal of pursuing a career in entertainment business, an interest she discovered through a summer class at UCLA. That led her to intern at Warner and start looking into law school through Career Education.
“What I love most about my job is that it’s a way to marry my interests in the business and legal side with my interest in creativity and helping support artists and songwriters,” she says. Sih, who wrote her senior thesis about the ethnomusicological, economic, and legal aspects of Taylor Swift’s rerecording of her music, appreciates that her professors were willing to tailor classes to her interests. “I think the world of Wellesley professors,” she says. She also says that Wellesley “really taught me how to make the most out of my resources.”
Grace Ramsdell ’22 returned to Wellesley after graduating to work for the Alumnae Association. Ramsdell had worked for Wellesley magazine as a student, which made the transition to being an employee feel natural. In her new role, she still gets to work on the magazine in addition to gaining new responsibilities. She says, “One of my favorite parts of my job is just learning about all the different things that alums are up to in the world, through the alum magazine and through association programs.”
Ramsdell is happy to be back on campus surrounded by the students and scenery, and she says she doesn’t take for granted that “Not only was I able to find full-time employment within the first six months after graduation, I also just got really lucky being able to come back to a department that I already cared about.”