Building Pathways to Possibility: How industry connections is opening doors for Arts and Sciences students

The Final Four, U.S. Open, Indianapolis 500 and Dallas Fort Worth International Airport.

Separately, these events and locations are massive in their own right. Together, they create experiences that last a lifetime for undergraduates in Ohio State’s College of Arts and Sciences.

And the Industry Connections team at the college’s Center for Career and Professional Success are the ones making those experiences happen.

“We work with alumni, employers and companies that want to engage with and hire Ohio State, specifically Arts and Sciences talent,” said Aaron Klein, who served as Assistant Director of Industry Connections at the center before recently accepting a position at the Fisher College of Business. 

“A lot of what we do is create partnerships. Reaching out to these corporations, engaging with them, understanding what their goals are, what their hiring needs are and how we can create partnerships to provide experiences for our students.”

The center’s Industry Connections team works to connect students with experiences that will not only stimulate their interest in certain industries but also connect them with alumni actively working in the field. The goal, of course, is to get students internships and help them find jobs once they obtain their degree.

Klein partnered with student groups, faculty, staff and alumni to create trips that immersed students in real-world professional environments across a range of industries. One of the most prominent organizations involved, Ohio State’s Sports and Society Institute (SSI), offered students access to major events such as the Women’s Final Four, the U.S. Open and the Indianapolis 500. Beyond the excitement of these experiences, Klein hopes students walk away with a broader perspective — an understanding that there are countless ways to break into different industries, and that hands-on experience and strong professional networks are essential to discovering and succeeding in a career.

Partnerships with companies like Southwest Airlines have expanded learning beyond the classroom. In spring 2025, students traveled to Dallas–Fort Worth International Airport to tour Southwest and American Airlines headquarters and explore diverse career opportunities within the aviation industry.

“The preconceived notion might be you have to be a pilot to work in aviation, when, in reality, most of the company at Southwest and American, they’re hiring non-pilots,” Klein said. “They’re hiring accountants, they’re hiring marketers, they’re hiring communication staff. For the students, it’s really a first-hand experience to see what it is like to work in that industry.”

The connection with Southwest was made in part thanks to Ezequiel Herrera, who earned a BA in psychology and communication in 2020. He interned at Southwest in the summer of 2019 before being hired by the airline in 2022 as a talent acquisition specialist. Now an associate program manager, Herrera is proud of his time at Ohio State and said he enjoys giving back to the university that helped him get his start at Southwest.

“I feel like I’m paying back all the investment that Ohio State made in me,” Herrera said. “I think the beautiful thing about the partnership with Aaron and the career office is it’s really helped cascade our message about what Southwest Airlines is, who we are trying to uplift and working to find different ways to engage Ohio State students.”

One thing Herrera and his team made sure to do on the Southwest trip was expose students to both the operational and corporate side of the industry, furthering Klein’s desire to open the eyes of students to different career paths within the same field.

“There’s a lot of operational roles where students can get good jobs. We show them the airplane hangar, and they get to go underneath the inside of the planes. They get to look at the mechanical components and learn how much one singular jet engine costs,” Herrera said. “We also want to inspire folks to become pilots, so we get them into our pilot simulators.”

Southwest Airlines also supported the trip by providing 10 complimentary flights for Ohio State students traveling to Dallas, increasing access and allowing more students to participate in the experience.

“By creating that gift, that’s giving us more leverage to send more students,” Klein said. “This idea of experiential learning has really grown over the last three years. A lot of it is driven by strong connections with alumni like Ezequiel.”

Beyond exposing students to diverse career paths, Ohio State’s Industry Connections team is centered on creating meaningful connections — linking students with professionals through partnerships like the ASC Match Mentor Program. Started in the fall of 2018, the ASC Match Mentor Program is a college-wide initiative that matches alumni from the College of Arts and Sciences, one-to-one, with current Arts and Sciences majors.

Largely, the mentee can decide how often or where to meet, but the program requires a minimum of two meetings per semester. Mentors and mentees are typically matched based on their major, and even the lesser-known majors have mentors that are eager to get involved.

Shirley Wu, also an Assistant Director of Industry Connections, graduated from Ohio State in 2020 as a double-major in linguistics and political science, adding a minor in Chinese. Wu signed up to be a mentor, and it just so happened that another linguistics major was searching for a match.

“It’s really rewarding to be able to give back, especially to young linguistics majors, of which there are not too many of us,” she said. “I really value getting to broaden the horizons of what’s possible for students. Even if I don’t have a lot of life experience, I know resources that can help. I know what it’s like to be kind of confused. The experience overall has been really rewarding.”

The “connections” part of industry connections particularly rings true with Herrera. He uses the analogy “leave the water running” when speaking with mentors, but specifically mentees who are looking to find their first postgraduate job.

“Once it starts getting cold and you leave your house on vacation, what do you normally do in the Midwest? You leave the water running so your pipes don’t freeze and burst. It’s kind of hard to tell students from California and Texas this,” Herrera, a native of Northwest Ohio, said with a laugh. “Don’t just reach out (to your contacts) when you need them but constantly maintain that communication. If you can create a long-term relationship, students will have more to relate to, and those are the students that go above and beyond.”