Troy, N.Y. — This week, the annual Spring Career Fair on February 10 at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) will attract employers from across the country seeking to hire full-time employees and co-op and summer interns from all five schools within the technological research university. However, it’s not just engineers and science students making the big splash into the marketplace.

Graduates of the business school at Rensselaer, the Lally School of Management, are in strong demand, with undergraduates’ starting salary averaging nearly $65,000 and 96 percent placement within the first six months after graduation. Domestic graduate students in the MBA or M.S. programs have 100 percent placement within the first three months of graduation and average salaries as high as nearly $76,000. These strong starting salaries are often paired with compelling sign-on bonuses, benefit plans, and/or relocation packages.

The statistics for Lally School graduates buck the national trend cited by numerous studies including “The Class of 2015: Despite an Improving Economy, Young Grads Still Face an Uphill Climb” released in May 2015 by the Economic Policy Institute, which states that “For young college graduates, the unemployment rate is currently 7.2 percent, and the underemployment rate is 14.9 percent.”

“Students consistently choose Lally to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunities we offer as a business school in a world-class, technological research university,” said Thomas Begley, dean of the Lally School of Management. “The emphasis on encouraging students to take up programs in multiple schools at Rensselaer provides an extremely powerful combination of studies in management with engineering, or computer science, or even a double major like science and entrepreneurship with an eye toward technology. Our students aren’t just ready for today’s business marketplace, they are preparing for business careers of the future.”

Rensselaer business students gain advantage through preparation of core elements critical to business success. Even at the undergraduate level, students gain experiential learning in management, critical decision making, relationships and teamwork, quantitative analysis, and computational skills. The Lally Bachelor of Science in Business and Management provides eight different business concentrations that place students in a position to learn about the business world, while accessing the latest science, technology, and data. Each Lally MBA or Master of Science program offers a specialized graduate business experience that allows graduates to bring their careers to another level. The pivotal difference in all these programs is the curriculum being taught within the Institute's forward-thinking technologically enhanced environment.

Kayla Jones ’16 will start a robust career this May with Ernst & Young as a consultant in the technology advisory division of their financial services office in New York City. The Lally undergraduate student is a business and management and electronic media, arts, and communication major with a concentration in graphic design. Ernst & Young was the site of her intensive summer internship, where she served on a team to create solutions for clients with consolidations, regulatory reporting, management information reporting, and project coordination. Jones credits her success to knowing how to apply her strong business skills (analytical processing, program refinement, and strategic plan implementation) within client engagements that require sophisticated technology processes and controls. Additionally, she gained international business experience during her study abroad program at ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain, during her junior year.

Shivani Devaki Ginde ’16, a master’s in business analytics student at Lally, recently interned at the Boeing Company, combining large amounts of back-end data from several different systems into data visualization displays to summarize the information and identify trends. She also gained leadership experience working at Target as an executive team leader intern interfacing with guests and solving customer-service problems. On campus, Ginde serves as a full-time resident director in a freshman residence hall, where she oversees a staff of four and manages the hall’s financial budget for the academic year. This May, Ginde will start a full-time job with Deloitte Advisory in New York City as a cyber risk advisory consultant, applying her business, data, and technology innovation skills to strategies for securing proprietary information and other critical business assets.

These outcomes at the Lally School of Management are a reflection of Rensselaer as The New Polytechnic, a new paradigm for teaching, learning, and research,—a view of the technological research university as a fresh collaborative endeavor across disciplines, sectors, and global regions. Rensselaer leads by using advanced technologies to unite a multiplicity of disciplines and perspectives, in order to take on large, multi-faceted challenges to become transformative in three fundamental ways: in the global impact of our research, in our innovative pedagogy, and in the lives of our students.

For more information about the Lally School of Management, visit http://lallyschool.rpi.edu/.