Heading on out: Students head for out-of-state opportunities
With the semester rolling to an end and people making their individual plans for the summer, a common catchphrase is, “What are you doing this summer?”
The responses vary from a career for those graduating and anything from staying in Logan and working to traveling across the ocean from some Study Abroad time
Also, many students will be heading out of state to work.
For Isaac Felix, a senior in accounting who worked in Brooklyn, N.Y., last summer for J.P. Morgan as a project analyst, he said he left because the idea of working for a global company interested him.
He spoke of other advantages of working outside Utah.
“You’re exposed to so much when you go out of state. So now I’m heading to California, over to the other coast, and it is just for the exposure and the experience,” he said. “The money is great as well, but the cost of living is higher there, so they compensate you accordingly.”
He also explained his theory of why there is so much money available.
“A lot of people want to stay in Utah, so that just drives the wages down and out of state it isn’t as hard to find a job that pays well,” he said. “My wife got offered a full-time job with a fixed-income group in located mid-Manhattan after working there through a temp agency for the summer. There are just more opportunities out of state.”
Working out of state is old hat to Chris Bybee, a senior majoring in finance and economics, who will works this summer in Nashville, Tenn., selling home alarms systems for his third summer out of state.
“I started out selling pest control in Ventura, Calif., because I wanted to get a patent. Then once you do summer sales, it’s hard to stop. It sucks you in, like the red pill on ‘The Matrix’ — once you know what it is like to make cash quickly, it’s hard to go back,” Bybee said.
It’s not just about the cash for everyone though Matthew Swank, a junior in mechanical engineering, is traveling to San Diego, Calif., this summer to participate in the Christian Campus Ministry program.
“That’s just where it was, not that I necessarily wanted to leave, and it was something that I wanted to do. So, hopefully, I can get a job at Sea World while I’m there,” Swank said.
Holly Suisse, a senior in biology education, said the desire to work out of state was threefold the summer she was out of state: to get experience in her field, to earn better money and to be with her dad.
“I started out in northern Minnesota doing a forestry internship looking for dwarf mistletoe for two months to get experience in my field. Then I moved to Riverside, Calif., with my dad and worked at Subway as a temp until the high school kids came back,” she said.
“It worked out well in California. I got the increase in pay without the increase in the cost of living,” Suisse said. “Working out of state wasn’t quite what I expected, though. The forests are very different than they are here and Riverside was weird because I grew up in Panguitch, Utah, and I’m not use to a big city. It was a good experience though.”
-nealmsnow@cc.usu.edu