With more than 28 students representing the colleges of engineering and business at MSU, the Career Services Network Spring Break Corporate Tour took students to new levels of job exploration and career counseling. Nearly thirty percent of the students participating in the tour were MSU international students.

You can do whatever you want has new meaning, said Yuanyuan Fu, after hearing the same sentence repeated multiple times at each company. Fu, a freshman from China studying accounting, said visiting famous American companies and talking to employees face-to-face has given her a more conscious outlook on her future.

Seeing how companies operate in real life and having a chance to talk to employers were the best parts of the trip, said Haihua Gu, a freshman from China studying civil engineering. It opened my eyes; I saw things, I heard things and I gained valuable experience that you will not get out of a lecture, said Gu.

For six days, representatives from the Career Services Network in both the college of business and the college of engineering took students to corporate headquarters of six major corporations in Minnesota. Among the companies visited during this years tour were IBM, General Mills and Target.

We want to give students the opportunity to see what it is like to work in corporate America, said Pepa Carlson, Career Services Network representative in the college of business, and the original organizer of the corporate tour.

The College of Engineering joined the alternative spring break project in 2008, bringing additional corporate connections to expand the available tours.

Students on the tour have the opportunity to meet people in careers that they might like to have, as well as those in charge of hiring those people. The trip includes tours of each company, meetings with executives and, new this year, a community service excursion organized by one of the companies with a local charity.

This year, the group went to a warehouse in Minneapolis to assemble food packets for Feed My Starving Children, a Christian charity distributing food internationally.

Organizers of the tour hope to have more participation from other colleges on campus, and plan to include more corporations as the tour grows. Inquiries about the tour may be sent to carlson@bus.msu.edu.