Brown and White Vol. 134 no. 24

              The Brown and White
Vol. 134 No. 24
Tuesday, May 8, 2018 ‘All the Lehigh News First’
Q&A: Cathy Engelbert Int’l students talk jobs
By KLAUDIA JAZWINSKA
Editor in Chief
By LAURYN RAGONE
Deputy News Editor
See ENGELBERT Page 3
Cathy Engelbert, ’86, the CEO
of Deloitte, will speak at the class
of 2018’s commencement speaker.
Engelbert spoke with The Brown and
White about the takeaways of her
Lehigh experience and the signifi-cance
of authentic leadership.
Q: How has Lehigh affected
your career and all of your suc-cess?
Have there been moments
where you’ve looked back and
thanked Lehigh for something it
taught you?
CE: Oh, absolutely. One of the
most interesting things was when
I was interviewing, coming out of
Lehigh, for full-time employment,
and I’ll never forget… one of the
people that interviewed me said,
“Lehigh just really produces really
well-rounded individuals” — not only
academically but socially, athletically
for me because I played two sports
at Lehigh. So I always felt Lehigh
brought me out of my shell. I was
pretty shy when I got to Lehigh in
1982…I think playing athletics gave
me confidence, and Lehigh taught me
how to be a leader.
Q: Speaking of that, you are
now the CEO of a company that
employs many Lehigh graduates.
What kind of advice do you have
for them — and all of this year’s
graduates — about starting their
careers?
CE: Because of the exponential
pace of change in the world today,
even though you’re graduating with
your degree — and obviously lots of
different degrees, whether it’s engi-neering
or business or arts and sci-ences,
STEM degrees — you can
never graduate…So my advice is,
keep learning, keep upskilling, keep
essentially wanting to build your
capabilities more broadly, because I
think the world is going to need this
generation in order to really solve
some complex problems that are out
in the world today.
Q: What is it like to be a female
leader in a male-dominated
field? Did you feel your Lehigh
education set you up to face that
challenge?
CE: That’s another thing I give
Lehigh (credit for, and) probably a
little bit of my upbringing. So I’m
from a very big family, where both
my parents worked but I was one of
eight kids, and I had five brothers.
So growing up, I’d kind of call it a
Christina Qin, ’18, heard about
the struggles of finding a job after
graduation in the United States but
didn’t fully understand until she
went through the career process.
Qin, who is from Hangzhou, China,
is pursuing a degree in industrial
systems engineering. It wasn’t until
the end of her sophomore summer,
after she interned in China, that Qin
found her desire to work full time in
the U.S.
During her junior year, she attend-ed
every event Lehigh offered in the
fall recruitment process and applied
for many internships, but was not
successful.
“I didn’t land any sort of interview
my first semester of junior year, and
I was pretty upset,” Qin said. “Being
an international student, it was extra
hard to land a job or interview.”
Qin is one of the 282 international
students graduating May 21.
Lynn D’Angelo-Bello, the associate
director of graduate student career
development, assists international
graduate students in overcoming spe-cific
cultural barriers when facing the
U.S. job search.
D’Angelo-Bello said she helps stu-dents
with the application process,
completing mock interviews and
understanding the nuances of com-municating
through self-branding
with U.S. employers. She said she
clarifies U.S. employer expectations
and teaches cultural behaviors and
conversational patterns to help pre-pare
students for interviews and net-working
opportunities.
“International students do have
some additional challenges in secur-ing
a job or internship, mostly
because they need to obtain spon-sorship
from the organization (when
searching for full-time employment),”
D’Angelo-Bello said.
When an international student
receives an internship or accepts a
job offer, they go through a special
process to ensure their stay in the
U.S.
Samba Dieng, the director of the
Office of International Students and
Scholars, said his office advises stu-dents
in filling out the necessary
paperwork to pursue these opportu-nities.
Dieng said students who receive an
internship during the school year or
summer have to apply for Curricular
Practical Training, also known as
CPT, which allows students to com-plete
an internship related to a specif-ic
course they have taken at Lehigh.
After applying to more than 80
internships, Bohan Chen, ’19, who
is from Shanghai, China, completed
See JOBS Page 3