In 11th Year, Sophomore Career Connections Offers a Wealth of Insight

Conceived just over a decade ago by Vassar alum Carol Ostrow ’77, P’09, ’15, and her husband, Michael Graff, this year’s program offered sophomores the chance to connect with mentors in 20 different industries ranging from the arts and entertainment to data science, technology, entrepreneurship, and more. The event is co-hosted every January by the Center for Career Education and the Office of Advancement. A record 257 students attended this year’s program, guided by 107 mentors and members of the Career Education staff. Since its inception in 2015, more than 2,500 sophomores and 700 alum and parent mentors have taken part in the program.

The event kicked off on January 17 with a keynote address by Minerva Tantoco ’86, whose serpentine career path spoke volumes about the value of a Vassar liberal arts education. A philosophy major at Vassar, Tantoco has been a founder of the digital bank Grasshopper (a nod to Vassar alum and tech pioneer Grace Hopper, class of 1928), and an AI patent holder whose journey has taken her to Silicon Valley to Wall Street to New York City government and elsewhere. “At Vassar, you are acquiring all the necessary skills—critical thinking and problem solving—to analyze the complex problems that are important in tech and almost any other field,” she told those assembled at her address in Skinner Hall.

Tantoco said her grounding in philosophy had taught her ethical reasoning. “This skill is critical in the age of artificial intelligence as questions of fairness and privacy are posed,” she said. “We will need that broad-based learning you are getting at Vassar so that AI serves humanity. Today’s technology needs your liberal arts mindset, so let it be your superpower.”

Tantoco reiterated some of these themes when she joined five other panelists from various technology fields at three information sessions on January 18. “One piece of advice I have for students is to show employers a significant task you have tackled and completed, and you have done that many times at Vassar,” she said. “You have an advantage over many others [entering the job market] because you are doing that work here right now.”

Eli Stein ’12 told those attending the Technology panel that their career paths would likely echo his and Tantoco’s. Stein worked as an admissions officer at Vassar before joining a startup company that advised such clients as Drizly and Carnival Cruises. He currently heads a product management team at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. “One of my tasks at the startup was advising Carnival Cruises on how to make the most of the recovering market coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic,” he said, “and the skills I acquired at Vassar helped me do that.”

Another panelist, Jon Temple ’87, a design principal at IBM, said the broad-based education he received at Vassar had enabled him to adapt to changes in his field over the past 30 years. “As a team leader, my communication skills are important, and I acquired those skills in my psychology and anthropology courses at Vassar,” Templeton said.

A student who attended the panel discussion, Lindsay Taylor ’27, said the information she obtained was reassuring. “I learned that Vassar is preparing me well to embrace many new career paths and about all the resources I have to get to the next step in my life,” Taylor said.

Another student, Gene Waddy ’27, a media studies and political science double major from Manalapan, NJ, said he felt the same way after attending the industry panel on entrepreneurship. “I’ve known for a long time that I want to work in media in some capacity, and maybe own my own business,” Waddy said. “After listening to these people who have succeeded as entrepreneurs, people who know how to function outside their comfort zones and have a vision, I know it’s now possible for me.”

Members of the panel on scientific research described the disparate paths their careers had taken. Some, like Max Fagin ’10, had a plan mapped out by sophomore year at Vassar, and Fagin said he had agreed to be a mentor to advise students that having a plan is never a bad idea. Fagin knew he wanted to be an aerospace engineer, so he applied to the Vassar-Dartmouth Thayer Dual Degree Program in Engineering, which enabled him to earn degrees in physics and astronomy from Vassar and in engineering from Dartmouth in five years. After graduating from Dartmouth, Fagin was accepted into a master’s degree program in engineering at Purdue University and has worked for several space agencies, including NASA, since completing his degree. He is currently employed by the private aerospace firm Blue Origin, where is he is a member of a team that is designing a lunar landing craft for a 2030 flight to the moon by four NASA astronauts.

“I took an unorthodox path studying science at a liberal arts school,” Fagin said, “so I wanted to return to Vassar for Sophomore Career Connections to show them there were ways, such as the Dartmouth engineering program, to achieve their goal. Vassar gave me the general knowledge of science I needed—a background in astronomy and physics—to do my job, but I also needed specialized engineering training.”

Another member of the panel, Kael Ragnini ’19, a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at Harvard University, advised those attending the session to refrain from jumping directly from Vassar into graduate school. “There’s no benefit in that path,” Ragnini said. “Find a research job [after graduation from Vassar] that will help you find out what your passion is.”

As for choosing a graduate school, both Ragnini and Daniella Lorman ’22, a research associate at the Taub Institute of Columbia University Irving Medical Center, advised those attending the panel that finding the right mentor at the graduate level was more important than trying to find the right school. “Take the time to learn about the background of the leader of your research team, the principal investigators, for your research,” Lorman said. “That’s more important than choosing the school itself.”

Sam Schwamm ’16, a research manager at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, said Vassar had prepared him well for all the non-technical aspects of his job. “The public speaking and writing skills I got here have helped me immensely,” Schwamm said. “Vassar is a place not just for academics but for making good friends. My soft skills have gotten me further than getting good grades.”

The students prepared themselves for the industry panels by attending a workshop designed to teach them resiliency and the importance of teamwork and reacting quickly to failure. Teams of five or six students were challenged to build towers composed solely of strands of spaghetti, tape, and a single marshmallow. They were given 18 minutes to complete the task. Most of the teams built towers successfully, and the team members who built the highest tower—

measuring more than 30 inches in height—were awarded tiny trophies. The exercise concluded with a rock-paper-scissors tournament in which all of the participants paired off until a final champion—June Pierson ’27, a geography major from Seattle, WA—was crowned while all of her peers cheered wildly for her victory.

Following the industry panels, two members of the Career Education staff—Stacy Bingham, Associate Dean of the College for Career Education and Interim Director of Fellowships, and Jannette Swanson, Director of External Engagement in the Career Education office, were honored for their work by the Alumnae/i Association of Vassar College (AAVC).

Throughout the weekend, students and mentors talked about the value of the program. One mentor, Alexia Gordon ’91, has dual careers: one as a physician who now works for the U.S. Army Nuclear and Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction Agency, and another as a murder mystery novelist. One of her novels, Murder in G Major, was turned into a Hallmark movie starring Tamera Mowry-Housley.

Gordon’s advice to the students: “Don’t get trapped in a pigeonhole. Don’t be afraid to move outside the narrow bounds of what you—or others—think you should do and try things you want to do. You don’t have to have it all figured out by 35. You may discover a new path.”

Vassar Trustee Anne Green ’93, CEO of G&S Integrated Marketing Communications Group, returned to Sophomore Career Connections for the eighth time, and like Gordon, she spent the weekend advising students to think broadly about their futures—and she said Vassar was preparing them well. “As a CEO, as a client counselor, I know we need people who are intellectually curious, who can connect the dots, who have interests that range across many things, who are multidisciplinary in how they think. So yes, you will get trained on how to do a specific thing in the stuff that we do every day,” Green said. “But a lot of it is how you think, how curious you are and how ready you are to learn and how quickly you assimilate information, and I think that a Vassar education and a liberal arts education is amazing that way.”

Those who attended said they were grateful for all the advice they were receiving. “The opportunity to connect with alums from many different fields has been truly inspiring,” said Mia Soret ’27. “I’m just really excited for the opportunity to be here.”

Daniel Furman ’27 said he was reassured by the mentors he met that a Vassar liberal arts education was the best tool for future success. “Having the freedom and flexibility to pick your classes and having the opportunity to have a double major while most universities only allow for a single has been really useful,” Furman said. “I’m also a student-athlete here—we have 29 varsity sports along with many other club and intramural sports at Vassar—and that has been an awesome experience, too.”

As the program drew to a close, Bingham reminded the students that their quest for a career path had just begun. “It is my sincere hope that you were both inspired and reassured by our keynote speaker, Minerva Tantoco, about the importance of humanity and humans in our increasingly AI-driven world,” she said. “I hope this weekend has reaffirmed that a liberal arts education is foundational to asking and answering the increasingly complex questions of our planet. The work of finding our place in the world, of figuring out who we are and who we are meant to be is cyclical—and lifelong. It’s messy and it’s exhilarating. Sometimes our spaghetti towers fall, but we fail fast, iterate, prototype, and we move on to the next plan.

“This is just the beginning of your relationship with both the Vassar network and the amazing staff in the Center for Career Education,” Bingham continued. “You have a huge network of champions and supporters in this room and beyond. Seek us out in the days, weeks, and years to come.”

View a gallery of images from Sophomore Career Connections 2025, and listen or watch Minerva Tantoco '86 on the most recent episode of Vassar's Conversations @ the Salt Line podcast.