SVSU Graduates

“I graduated from John Glenn High School. Go Bobcats! Then all of a sudden, I was like, 'Well, I don't even know what I want to do.' I knew I wanted to go to college, some level of higher education, and how much my family would love that being a first-generation graduate.

I was just kind of browsing and weighing my options, when a rep from SVSU came along and said, 'Hey, we really want you to be a Cardinal.' And I said, 'Give me a reason.' They said I could go to school while being close to my family and the scholarships were great, so I said, ‘Why not?’

So I joined the Cardinal family, went into business management and marketing, and just graduated in 2023. Since graduation, I am just focusing on my business, TALN Media, a video marketing agency.

SVSU and all the professors here really helped me in this path. Everybody thinks, 'You come here for an education, a degree, and then get a job.' But you can also come here to become an entrepreneur. We have the great Scott L. Carmona College of Business and a lot of great professors who are willing to help you along the way.

I had a ton of great professors throughout my career at SVSU, but two were really influential to me, the first being Dr. Hillary Mellema, a marketing professor here at Saginaw Valley. She was just excited to teach, man! When somebody has that true energy of ‘I want to teach you guys something and it isn't about the grade’, it really makes you feel like you’re learning something important. She taught me a lot about marketing and sales and propelled me into my business. And even after I first started my entrepreneurship journey, she helped guide me and helped me land a few clients. So I have to give a big thanks to her.

The other professor is Izabela Samanska, an entrepreneurship professor here at Saginaw Valley. When I first started my freshman year, with no business classes or anything, I signed up for the elevator pitch competition here—and she guided me all through the journey of being a business person and she held my hand all the way through. I had her as a professor almost every year I was here at Saginaw Valley, so I gotta give a big thanks to her.

There are a lot of great entrepreneurs in Bay City, Saginaw, and the rest of the Great Lakes Bay Region, a lot of great people doing great things. But it's very cool to see all these SVSU students working now out in the marketing field here locally, people working at nonprofit agencies and credit unions. As a business owner, it's nice to connect with those people and see that they're doing great things. They're creating great advertisements for businesses while also putting on events that people around our age love to go to. I just love seeing the community and everything that spouts around it.

My advice to people trying to figure out a career would be to see what’s out like, explore what you like. Get connected with your professors or your network and go try something. Go talk to an art professor, sit in the art wing and see if you like screen printing, or go on the business wing and sit through one of the lectures. I think it's really important to get out there and see what's out there, to see what you like and you can do a little bit of everything. You might try something and think, ‘You know, that's not for me’ and that’s great. So I would just say don’t be afraid to reinvent yourself and explore your options.

College should be an experience where we try to figure out who we are and define ourselves, right? It can be easy to rush into feeling like you have to get a degree and then job and then get out there, but it's important for us to explore all the options and figure out who we are as people, first. That opportunity to figure out who you are is part of the beauty of going to college, especially a college like SVSU.”

–Damien Perez, Saginaw Valley State University Graduate

“In high school, I joined the military, and when I finished Basic Training and AIT, I ended up moving to Illinois and going to a small college there for pre-med. Then I found out that I was going to have a child, so I had to make a decision very quickly on how I was going to be able to balance college and a baby. I decided the best decision was to move back home to Saginaw, and that led me to enrolling at Saginaw Valley State University. I was still in the pre-med program when I realized that it was not as easy as I thought it was going to be to take a child to study groups! That led me to really question what I was interested in, and I decided I was really interested in understanding people, and that led me to my major in psychology.

Then at the end of my degree, one of my favorite professors looked at me and said, ‘Everything about you is a social worker.’

And they were right. So I finished that degree, applied for the Social Work program, was accepted, and I ended up getting a double Bachelors degree. My professors were so influential for me and really helped guide me in so many ways outside of the classroom.

I remember John Kacynzki went around the classroom and asked, 'What do you want to do after you graduate?' Everybody wanted to leave, and I'm like, 'Yeah, I want to leave, too.'

Then at the end, he looked at everybody and said, 'If you all leave and take your talent with you, how is this place ever gonna have what you're looking for? What you're actually running to?'

Honestly, at first, I ignored what he said, thinking, 'Oh, he's not talking to me. There are so many other people...' But I always had that in the back of my mind, and as time went on I started to think, 'He's right. How can our community grow if we leave?' Professor Vanessa Brooks Herd was awesome in helping me challenge some identity issues I was having in regards to being biracial. She helped me feel like it was okay that people didn't see the full me and that I can live in that. That was profound for me. Ed Jones and Dr. Margres helped me prepare for coming back to SVSU as a professor, transitioning from student to faculty, along with so many things they taught me about real life.

I'm a social worker by trade. However, when I went back to grad school and I was getting my doctoral degree, someone posed the question to me, ‘Do you want to stay in clinical work? Or do you want to help the community on a larger scale by going into education?’ That question allowed me to accept the idea that I could make a huge impact if I came back to Saginaw Valley and became a professor. For me, that is so inspiring because I know one day the students that we are teaching, they're going to be the ones helping me, my family, and my friends, and the fact that I know the skills that they're obtaining here at SVSU gives me that much more confidence.

So I came back, and I'm currently an assistant professor of social work at Saginaw Valley.

For students trying to figure out what they want to do in life, I would say that you need to ask questions. Sometimes you may have an interest in a certain area but don’t have the words to put with it, so talking to a counselor, parents, or friends can help formulate where your interests are. I also think that students should go on campus tours. I know some high schools do offer that. Especially if you are first generation or even second generation college student in your family, you don’t have the capacity to know all the departments here and the options you have, and when you’re exposed to those options, you can start to wonder what you can actually do.

I also want students to know that it's okay to change your major. There's so much pressure to feel like you need to know exactly what you want to do by a certain age, but that's unrealistic. It's okay to change your major, it's okay to explore those general education classes that all four-year programs have, it's okay to say, ‘Hey, I may be interested in a history class’ or ‘Maybe I need to go look at this computer class.’ I think really exploring those gen eds versus saying, ‘Oh, I just need to get it done,’ can open up new opportunities.”

—Dr. Ashley Sanders, Saginaw Valley State University

“I work right for HL Mando, a power steering company located in Novi, at their Bay City location. What pushed me into the electrical engineering field initially was my experience back in my exchange year with the robotics team. I realized that I like being able to troubleshoot, problem-solve, and build things that do something. It was a cool feeling.

Then as I moved on through college, I started to narrow down where I wanted to go with it. I remember having a ton of Hot Wheels and Matchbox sets as a kid, decorating them, playing with them all over the place, looking at them, and I thought, ‘Cars would be the perfect thing.’

What keeps me loving the field is the chance to always be learning: you’re always using your brain and troubleshooting and problem-solving. I’m also fortunate that my position isn’t completely technical: it also involves talking with other people and team members, working with the program managers and the separate technical teams to make sure that everything's on track.

It's hard to pick out just one person who was influential for me here at SVSU. My professors, like Dr. Rajani and Dr. Kuruppu. They taught me a lot of things, not only in the academic world but also in how to lead a team. We were part of the robotics team that went and did the NASA competition, and that took a lot of outside skills, soft skills other than just theoretical and academic, to be able to run that and lead that group functionally and properly. Whenever I had problems, I went to Dr. Rajani and I asked her, 'What should I do in this situation?' Then Dr. Kuruppu really helped with finding a job when I was first applying for jobs. It was kind of difficult to navigate the professional world, and they helped me.

The advice I’d give to young people thinking about their future career is the same advice I gave to my brother, who’s back in Bangladesh. When he graduated high school, he was confused about what he wanted to do. He was thinking about going into STEM because he thought ‘that’s where all the money is’, but I told him, ‘Take some time, look into yourself, and figure out what you really enjoy. Because at some point, you have to think, this is something that you're going to be doing for a really long time. Compared to how long we've been in school, this is way longer than that.’ I think for people who are confused in high school about what they want to do, it's absolutely worth it to step back, maybe even possibly take a gap year before going into college and ask, ‘Is this something that I'm interested in?’ Don’t get pushed into becoming something.

And I can tell you my brother is going to be graduating later this year, and he is really happy with the path that he has gone down and the major that he has decided to go with.

For people in college still trying to figure it out, it’s OK to realize two years in that "Oh, maybe I don't want to do this.’ Talk with your family and friends to get some guidance and support. No worries! There's actually more support out there for you than you might realize. Take a step back, talk to the Career Center over here, they’ve got some great people, or talk to a professor.’

—Waliul Matin,Saginaw Valley State University Graduate