Business Management Major Applies Classroom Skills to Real World Experience
Curtis Wetzel ’17
Shaping future career goals
By Kaytlyn Gordon ‘19
As many college students scramble to receive internships, Curtis Wetzel ’17 took his career into his own hands and applied for an internship with Olympus Corporation of America.
Wetzel, a business management major, earned the internship during the spring semester of his junior year. The corporation specializes in creating medical equipment, and tasked Wetzel with creating a portal website for medical fellows in endoscopy.
“This internship gave me an outlet to express my own thoughts, test my abilities, and merge action with information to create something new.” —Curtis Wetzel '17
The internship involved maintaining a busy schedule while Wetzel learned the ins and outs of a career in the marketing department, “On a typical day I would be in a meeting discussing coordination of these projects across departments, working with the field managers over teleconferencing, researching effective methods of marketing through websites, and documenting and communicating progress with my manager,” Wetzel says. “Overall, I needed to practice discipline, respect for laws and regulations, and incorporate fun and creativity into this field.”
Wetzel was able to take the skills he learned from within the walls of ɫɫ University and apply them to his internship experience. “The classroom did more than give me a basis of information—it taught me how to think,” Wetzel says. “This internship gave me an outlet to express my own thoughts, test my abilities, and merge action with information to create something new.”
The internship experience not only gifted Wetzel with work experience, but also allowed him to rethink his future career goals. As he enters into the workforce, Wetzel is now aware of the vast possibilities that his education has provided for him.
“My future plan is to experiment with jobs, try new things, and network like crazy even if it is not my intended field,” Wetzel says. “I want to learn as much as I can, about as many things as I can, and lastly I want to follow the beat of my own drum.”