While her classmates are ‘walking’ at Commencement this week, Karina Escobar ’25, will be working. And although the Global Supply Chain Management (GCSM) major, who completed her studies in December, is sad to be missing the graduation ceremony, she’s excited about getting her career off to a fast start as an Area Manager with Amazon.
Taking a job at Amazon’s McKinney, Texas, warehouse immediately upon graduation was a big step for the New Jersey native, but no more transformational than her first year as a Bulldog.
“I was very shy in high school, and going to Bryant was the first time I was away from home,” she recalls.
Now she’s ready to make her mark on the world — by helping deliver products around the globe.
A love of travel helped fuel Escobar’s interest in international business. At Bryant, that translated into choosing GCSM as a major and French as a minor (Escobar is also fluent in Spanish) after initially enrolling as an Accounting major.
“I wanted something more hands-on, so I spoke with the counselors at the Amica Center for Career Education and they connected me with professors and alumni who explained different career paths that I could follow based on my interests,” she remembers. “I said I like problem solving, I like challenges, and I like trying to make processes better. So they suggested that I try supply chain.”
Mentoring and experience
Escobar’s decision was cemented when she attended a National Retail Federation conference with Theresa McCarthy, Ph.D., associate professor of Marketing and Global Supply Chain Management, as a sophomore. Representatives from Best Buy she met at the convention suggested she apply for their internship program, recalls Escobar. “They brought me onto their team, and that was my first real-life experience with supply chain,” she says of being placed in a reverse logistics role, processing returned electronic goods to be sold on the secondary market.
The personal mentoring McCarthy provided was exactly what Escobar was hoping for when she enrolled at Bryant. “Going to a smaller school ended up being one of the best decisions I could have made, because it gave me the opportunity to work closely with my teachers and build real relationships with them,” she says.
That small school feel also came with global opportunities, Escobar found. Her language skills took a giant step forward during a semester abroad in Provence and Paris during her junior year. “That was a really immersive experience,” she says. “My comprehension went up so much being surrounded by the French language and culture and being with other people who are learning French and have the same passion for the language.”
The GCSM capstone program, Escobar says, was another standout part of her Bryant education, and one that has contributed greatly to her early career success.
Working as part of a team tasked with improving operations for musical instrument maker Zildjian, Escobar originally expected to help facilitate on-floor optimization, an area she had worked on during her internship at Amazon. When her team met with Zildjian, however, they found that there was much greater room for savings and improvement in forecasting and planning.
“I was on the enterprise resource planning forecasting side of the project, which challenged me because I’d never done forecasting before,” she says. “That allowed me to really understand how to apply what I learned in the classroom to real world experiences,” she says. “It's such a unique experience to have so early on because you're doing work that people typically do later on in their careers.”
The pivot and resulting shift in responsibilities, had other benefits as well. “I feel that the situations where you’re challenged are the ones where you grow the most,” she notes.
“I feel that the situations where you’re challenged are the ones where you grow the most."
Facilitating the journey
That growth, and the connections she made through Bryant, are already paying off, says Escobar. Her Best Buy internship was a direct springboard to an Amazon internship, during which she managed a team of about 50 employees. That, in turn, earned her an offer of a full-time position at Amazon immediately upon graduation.
It was only on her first day on the job in Texas that she learned that her role would be helping to facilitate “last mile” operations for a facility sends out about 100,000 packages for delivery each day.
Her undergrad experiences, Escobar says, have helped her rise to that challenge by providing her with an understanding of the full supply chain.
“In my internships and the capstone, I worked that first mile, I worked in corporate. So, it has helped me understand almost the full cycle of the product life,” she says. “Here, I’m walking around managing, having this direct impact. I’m not sitting down in an office; it’s straight onto the floor and directing people, making sure that we’re hitting our numbers and monitoring work in progress.”
It’s been quite the evolution from shy, first-year student to managing a warehouse team in just three and a half years, Escobar reflects.
“I can't say anything but good things about my Bryant education,” she says. “There were so many opportunities to challenge myself and improve my communication skills. It really helped me to develop both personally and professionally.”
“I can't say anything but good things about my Bryant education. There were so many opportunities to challenge myself and improve my communication skills. It really helped me to develop both personally and professionally.”
It’s also helped her prepare for future opportunities. For someone who loves travel, going from New Jersey to Rhode Island to Texas feels like first steps on a longer journey, especially since Amazon has operations around the world.
“In global supply chain you have that international and global markets aspect, and when the company is opening a new site, I feel like my language skills will give me a little extra leverage to take advantage of that opportunity,” Escobar says