Education
Woken awakes you to meaningful career opportunities [Show summary] Are you wondering what your career path should be? How to create it? Our guest today is an NYU Stern MBA and associate-certified coach who is also providing assistance with career services at Columbia Business School. In addition, she is the founder and CEO of Woken, an online platform to help you discover and pursue a career you will love. Let's learn her story and see how this interview will help you find that amazing career. Interview with Rachel Serwetz, NYU Stern Tech MBA grad and Founder & CEO of Woken [Show notes] Our guest today, Rachel Serwetz, graduated from Binghamton University after majoring in human development and minoring in Spanish, management, and global studies. She then worked for Goldman Sachs for three years, followed by shorter stints at other companies, and earned her MBA at NYU Stern in technology in 2019. She also founded Woken, way back in May, 2013, and has served as its CEO ever since. Let's talk a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up? What do you like to do for fun? Things like that. [3:35] I grew up in Long Island, New York, in Hewlett, a very exciting place. I've got a few jobs at the moment, so with my limited time outside of work, honestly I wish it was more exciting, but I try to just really hang out with family and friends, work out when I can, explore the city, travel. I wish there were times that I could fit in some more interesting hobbies, but work has sort of taken over this. Let's go back a little bit to your time at Goldman Sachs. Were you in a HR role there? Obviously that's your focus now, but did you start out in HR? Were you an investment banker at Goldman Sachs? What were you doing there? [4:10] So that was my first job, and I was in operations. I did cash management, I was part of the treasury and the liquidity team. And that doesn't have much to do with what I do now. And it wasn't really what I necessarily had an interest in, but when I started, I knew I liked the idea of operations. In hindsight, I think I probably should have gone more for those HR-type teams and path. But at the time I didn't really know that that was right for me. So I was able to land in operations, and it was a really good experience, but I was lucky at that point to take on projects that ended up relating to HR.But I took on those projects just because I found them interesting, I wanted to help our teammates develop skills, and to coach them and to help with recruiting, and so I just dove into things that seemed interesting to me. And then after a few years of doing that, I realized I was ready for the next thing, and I realized that a lot of what I had been doing was in the HR realm. And so I was lucky to be able to pivot more closely into that world after I left Goldman. Did you go back to NYU Stern for your MBA to get specifically more training in, let's say, career services and HR, or was there another goal? And if you were so interested in HR, why did you go for the one-year tech degree? HR isn't known as the most techie of fields. [5:37] There are a few answers to this. First and foremost, I always knew I wanted an MBA. I actually took my GMAT at my senior year of college. I wasn't a business major; I just had this intuition that I really just wanted more education, and I had a strong interest in business. I didn't really know where it would lead, or where I'd be at the time of getting that degree, but I just really knew there was more for me, and I knew I had that business orientation, even though it didn't end up being my major. So I knew from early on that I wanted that experience. Once I had ended up working more in HR, and learning about coaching and developing that, that's when I started really getting interested in the problems I was helping people with when I was coaching. I was helping with career exploration,