The pilot program supports travel to conferences that include career fairs, recruiter sessions, portfolio reviews, or hiring-focused networking events. Students can also design their own treks: personalized versions of the trips the office runs every spring break, which incorporate company visits and alumni meetings in a specific sector like finance, technology, or the arts.
"In this job market, we are constantly talking with students about how to make a personal connection, to find a different way to access opportunities besides being just one resume in a large pile that employers are struggling to process," CXD Executive Director Kristin Brennan said. "So this year in particular, we wanted to facilitate some of that activity, especially for students who could not otherwise afford to do that."
Priority is given to applicants who receive financial aid from Bowdoin and to seniors who have not yet secured a permanent job. Over the course of the spring, CXD anticipates it will support approximately thirty-six student trips. The program is funded by an endowment set up by donors to help Bowdoin students gain career exposure and experience.
"One of the things we appreciate about this fund is that it's flexible to the needs of students in a particular moment in time or a particular job market," Brennan said. "This year we think this is just the right kind of program for the moment, since we're seeing how effective it is for students to get out from behind the desk and meet people they might want to work with."
“I can make a stronger impression or demonstrate my interest even more when I'm in person. ”
—Katie O'Connell ’26
Students' Spring Trips
Asher Savel '26, an environmental studies and government major and urban studies minor, said he's attending a conference for urban planners in Detroit to learn about current trends in the industry and to connect with companies that hire recent college graduates. "I hope to build a greater network" of people who can alert him to job openings, he said.
- Africa Business Conference at Harvard Business School in Boston highlights Africa’s growing global influence across culture, technology, and commerce.
- Los Angeles Career Forum is a large job fair for Japanese-English bilinguals, Japenese companies, and multinational companies with Japanese offices.
- Outside Days Summit, organized by Outside Magazine, in Denver, attracts outdoor professionals.
- Women in Tech Global Impact Summit, in Washington, DC, is a virtual and in-person event.
- Brazil at Silicon Valley, in Sunnyvale, California, is a student-led conference to position Brazil as a player the global technology sector.
- National Planning Conference, in Detroit, is organized by the American Planning Association and attracts over 5,000 urban planning professionals.
His interest in planning stems from his love of working with people and policy. "I figure it is one of the best ways to make a real-world impact," he added.
Jada Amani '29 will be attending Harvard Business School's African Business Conference—an opportunity she's been looking forward to since a year ago, when she first heard about the annual event. She said she wants to "connect with people who think like me, who want to bring innovation back to Africa."
Now in its twenty-eighth year, the conference attracts over 1,000 attendees, including students from across the United States and African-based businesses seeking to recruit new talent.
Amani hopes to return home to Nairobi, Kenya, after graduating from Bowdoin, so she can apply her knowledge and skills—she intends to major in computer science and math—to help build her country's growing sectors in edu-tech, financial tech, or another area of technology-driven entrepreneurship.
Other students, like Katie O'Connell '26, are setting up their own networking trips. Over the past few months, O'Connell has reached out to many alumni working in her field of choice—life sciences consulting—to set up Zoom calls.
But nothing is better than meeting face to face. "I can make a stronger impression or demonstrate my interest even more when I'm in person," she said. Visiting potential employers also helps her get a sense of the workplace and its culture, she added.
For her upcoming trip, O'Connell, a biology major and Asian studies minor, is scheduling meetings with biotech and pharmaceutical companies in the Boston area. "I like that this work is cutting-edge, developing new technologies and therapies," she said. Though she'd like to work on the business side of the industry, she added that she wants to be in a scientific field that is also "health-based and patient-oriented."
It's no coincidence that she is using her grant to set up a mini trek of her own. Last spring, she joined CXD's Pharma and Biotech Trek to Boston, where she visited companies such as Novartis, Biogen, and Intellia. On that trip, O'Connell made a connection with an alumnus—CEO and founder of Momentum Biotechnologies Can Ozbal ’92—which led to a summer internship there that she called “the perfect internship on the business side of science.”
Based on that successful trek-to-internship experience, she applied for the grant to do it again on her own. "I spend a lot of my time networking!" she said. "I'm trying to do as much as I can, so as many people have me in mind when they're posting jobs."
