Project manager John Viau holds court in the back of Bryant University’s Academic Innovation Center during the Bryant Management Association Networking Night. As a steady stream of students from a range of class years and academic programs pop in for a visit, Viau talks about what his job entails and the finer points of project management, but he also shares the hard-won wisdom he’s acquired.

Starting out in your career? “Your first couple years are going to be a lot,” he admits. “Don’t worry about your title when you first get started — worry about what you can learn and how you can help your team.”

Potential internship destinations? “If you intern with a start-up, you’ll learn a huge amount and make a lot of connections — but you should know going in it will kick your butt,” Viau advises.

But it’s his advice on growing as a person and as a professional that is perhaps the most resonant with tonight’s event. “If you don’t have at least one foot in something that’s outside your usual comfort zone, you’re not really learning,” he states.

Organized by the student-run Bryant Management Organization (BMA) and the university’s chapter of Delta Sigma Pi, an international co-ed business fraternity, the Networking Night provided a forum for professionals representing a range of management-related fields, from accounting to finance to real estate to sports management, to share what they’ve learned with Bryant students.

But the session is also designed to help ease students into the networking process. The pacing is deliberately slow and comfortable. Nearly all of the students, and most of the industry representatives, are dressed casually.

“We want to make it as accessible for students as possible,” says Kyra Sette ’25, president of the BMA. “Sometimes students feel intimidated if it's a really formal event — especially if it’s their first networking session. We want to rip that band-aid off.

"When you bring everybody's experience to the table you can solve all sorts of problems.”

“One of the main goals of the night is that we hope that students walk away with more confidence and more understanding,” states Sette.

The networking night is also an opportunity to have conversations that go further in depth, says Robert Massoud, lecturer of Management, director of Bryant’s Team and Project Management program and an advisor for the BMA. “Bryant’s career fairs are incredible; they give you the opportunity to connect with so many people and organizations,” he says. “But sometimes you maybe only get a minute or two to talk because there’s so many people and it’s so focused. This is a little bit more of an opportunity to meet with people and get to know what they really do.”

The session opened with a short keynote from Michael Wisnewski, senior career coach for Bryant’s Amica Center for Career Education, who offered tips on the finer points of making connections. “It is pretty much impossible to overstate the value of a network,” he notes, regardless of where there’ll be in their career journey.

Wisnewski also urges the students to use the night as a learning opportunity — to be curious, to listen more than they speak, and most importantly, to enjoy the conversation.

From there, the students find their own path from table to table. Some move with purpose, eager to learn more about the career journey they’ve decided on. Others float, trying to take as much in as possible.

“One of the most important things we can do is give them peace of mind. We remind them that things are going to work out.”

That’s one of the most important parts of networking, discovering new possibilities, says Caitlynn Douglas, a program coordinator at United Way of Rhode Island, who offered advice at the non-profit table. “It’s about learning about all of the paths that exist out there,” she notes. But it’s also about making a range of connections.

You never know which ones might be important in the future, she points out. “When you bring a bunch of people into one room, every single person is bringing their own lived experience,” explains Douglas. “And when you bring everybody's experience to the table you can solve all sorts of problems.”

An event planning table helmed by Sydney Stewart ’22, an event coordinator at Fidelity Investments, and Katie Cafferty '21, community events and partnerships officer at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is a particularly busy one, and not just because it’s a popular career path.

As recent Bryant graduates, Stewart and Cafferty offer insight on what it’s like to be a young professional: the connections they made, the roadblocks they faced, and who they turned to for support along the way. “It can be hard to picture yourself out of college,” Stewart admits. “Tonight was a little about getting them ready for the next phase, when there are so many new opportunities open to them.”  

“One of the most important things we can do is give them peace of mind,” Cafferty reflects. “We remind them that things are going to work out.”

First-year student Colette McClenehen ’28, who attended the event with her friend Lindsey Marchesi ’28 and visited several of the tables, appreciated how the night was a complement to her in-class studies. “I think it's different being in a classroom versus actually talking to somebody face to face, because you can ask them what they do in a day, how they feel about working with other people, how their companies are, things like that,” she says. “It's different than just hearing it from a professor.”

“Every time I attend one of these, I learn about a new step I can take."

McClenehen jokes that she dragged Marchesi, an HR major, along with her to the networking session. But they both stayed for more than an hour. “It was really cool talking to everyone,” Marchesi says.

One of the last to leave the event is Kaitlyn Strauss ’26. A junior, Strauss has attended many  networking events at Bryant and moves with an easy confidence from table to table. She’s even talked to some of the representatives at tonight’s event before, she admits.

But Strauss keeps coming back. “Every time I attend one of these, I learn about a new step I can take,” she says. Each time she discovers a new contact, or learns a little more, or picks up a new insight or avenue.

She also keeps coming back for the stories.