When Weinberg senior Alex Alvarez Gutierrez accepted his return offer from Bain & Company, a management consulting company, after his summer internship, he credited his business fraternity, Alpha Kappa Psi, with helping him secure the position.
“I would have definitely not been able to get my job without AKPsi,” Alvarez Gutierrez said.
Alvarez Gutierrez is one of several Northwestern students who said their business fraternities provide a path to professional exposure and industry experience, from summer internships to full-time offers.
NU is home to three business fraternities: Alpha Kappa Psi, Delta Sigma Pi and Phi Gamma Nu. Each has a recruitment process for students with an interest in business.
For Alvarez Gutierrez, mentorship proved key: His AKPsi mentor taught him how to case — a consulting exercise often used in job and internship applications — and introduced him to her Bain colleagues, connections he said made all the difference.
The big-little system, which pairs a new member of a business fraternity with an upperclassman mentor, plays a central role in members’ early professional development, Alvarez Gutierrez said.
Weinberg senior Yana Tsetlin, executive vice president of AKPsi, said her big encouraged her to apply to a women’s program at Strategy&, which led to her securing a junior-year internship and ultimately a full-time offer at the consulting firm.
As a freshman, Tsetlin said she learned through the fraternity that there are business opportunities for every stage of university life. She said the fraternity helped her figure out what her professional plan would be while in college.
Once students join business fraternities, they go through a pledging process that introduces them to fields such as consulting, finance and technology. They can attend speaker events, network with alumni and coffee chat with upperclassmen.
Delta Sigma Pi has about 300 past members at NU in the alumni database, SESP junior Sebastian Anderson said. According to Anderson, students can access alumni information such as majors, LinkedIn profiles and contact details through the fraternity’s network.
“Throughout my internship recruitment process, that was a really big deal, because I was able to look through Northwestern DSP alums that were working at these companies.” Anderson said. “I think I networked with three or four at Bain Chicago specifically, and those were some of the strongest relationships I forged.”
Using her connections from DSP, Weinberg senior Anika Dewjee said she secured a full-time role at Deloitte after interning with the firm. Her team, made up entirely of DSP members, won the campus round of Deloitte Consulting National Undergraduate Case Competition at Northwestern before advancing to the firm’s Texas headquarters, where they placed first nationally.
“(That) really helped me get my foot in the door,” Dewjee said.
Weinberg senior Sarah Ordway, co-president of DSP, said that while the fraternity’s alumni network is powerful, not joining DSP does not signal professional failure.
“There’s a million routes to pre-professional success, and business fraternities are only one of them,” she said. “And also, when you think about success in life, that’s very much not just confined to pre-professional success.”
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