Katrina Cherk

Story by Helen Seilkop, photo courtesy of Katrina Cherk

“I think sometimes the right path is just taking the time to wander and explore.”

Katrina Cherk is the first to admit she wasn’t sure what she wanted long-term when she decided to major in Cognitive Sciences and minor in Business. She was interested in business, but there were so many potential routes to choose from — all of the options felt staggering.

Her freshman year, Katrina applied for the Owl Edge Externship program, hoping the job-shadowing could focus her interests. She successfully secured two externships in completely different work environments. One was a small start-up, while the other was a much larger tech company. Both felt a little overwhelming. Both felt like a risk.

She said, “You definitely have to push yourself outside of your comfort zone. I was really quite terrified to go to these externships the first time; I was just so nervous. But I think it’s because I was challenged in those ways (that) I was able to find and identify things I wanted to overcome and confront those issues.”

In fact, by pushing her own boundaries, she discovered she really enjoyed the close-knit culture of the start-up, and on the other hand, she enjoyed the resources a larger company could offer. Looking back, she credits these valuable experiences in helping her see what she was looking for in terms of location, culture, and workspace.

On campus, Katrina channeled her strengths, such as her love of design, through extracurriculars. She designed newspaper layouts for The Rice Thresher, managed the marketing and social media channels for the Rice Business Society, and designed frequently for The Catalyst, an undergraduate research science journal. She also discovered her love for travel by studying abroad and created a travel blog to update her friends and family on her adventures. But how did that translate into a career? She wasn’t sure.

The summer prior to her junior year, Katrina accepted a position with Intel as Strategy Intern while enrolled in the CCD’s “Careers Through Internships” class. She struggled with confidence as she tried to figure out how to find resources and support in a group that focused on electrical engineering — something she never studied at Rice. Completing the course reflections made her recognize this wasn’t the right path for her. As she came to terms with that realization, she said, “It’s okay. You don’t need to know exactly where you’re going at first, because, I think, along the way you’ll find something that intrigues you, or inspires you, or excites you that you may not have expected before. That’s what happened to me.”

By the time Katrina was a senior, she had explored many different aspects of business through externships and internships. She had gained experiences in communications, marketing, strategy, and design. She sought out advice from her peers, networked with alumni, and stayed persistent in looking for career opportunities. After years of exploring, she felt confident she wanted to pursue UI/UX design, marrying her love for design with the strategy-based business skills she had gained over the years. With this new focus, she conducted informational interviews and strategic networking to land a full-time position as UI/UX designer at the software company PROS.

Looking back as a Rice alum, Katrina is grateful for all of the experiences that led to her position at PROS — even the ones that didn’t work out the way she thought they would.“I think sometimes the right path is just taking the time to wander and explore. In college, you get that opportunity with pretty low consequences if you choose to switch things up or decide that’s not what you want to do. The CCD and other resources at Rice allows you to continuously do that,” she explains.

For Katrina, her trial and error was actually trial and success