Thursday, May 16, 2019
Allison Jurado ’19 will begin at JPMorgan Chase this summer
by Adam Grybowski
Last summer, Allison Jurado ’19 got her first taste of the commuter life.
In between semesters at Rider University, she was working as a paid intern in Brooklyn, N.Y. with JPMorgan Chase’s global finance and business management analyst program. Each weekday she joined the traveling masses on their daily journey from New Jersey to New York — two hours up, two hours down.
At the end of the program, she was offered a full-time position with the bank — meaning that she secured full-time employment for after college even before her senior year began. This month, Jurado is set to graduate from Rider with a bachelor’s in marketing and is looking forward to finally starting her new job with the largest bank in the U.S.
Her approach to the position — “I'm open to whatever opportunities it presents,” she says — is the same one Jurado took as an undergraduate. In addition to her internship and marketing major, she is graduating with a minor in business analytics and a certificate in leadership. She studied abroad in Croatia and served as a community assistant.
Perhaps most impressively, she completed the University’s Business Honors Program. The program, designed exclusively for business majors, allows students to participate in classes with the same group of students for all four years. The cohort creates a learning environment that encourages teamwork and critical thinking skills. It also requires a senior capstone, which Jurado wrote on the ill-fated Fyre Festival. Once touted as a luxury music festival on a tropical island, the festival became infamous following a disastrous rollout full of broken promises. Jurado received an outstanding academic achievement award for thesis writing.
“I conducted focus groups and took a bit of the legislative angle on exploring how governing bodies should respond to tactics used by the promoters, like influencer marketing,” she says. “The experience of doing the project was really great. It was a lot of work but I was passionate about it, and it made the project really fun.”
Jurado realized what she wanted to do with her life in high school.
After a psychology class had exposed her to the complicated process behind how people make decisions about what to buy, she found herself looking at the window display of her retail job and seeing it in a new light.
“I was beginning to understand its connection to marketing — the message contained in how things were posed, the lighting, the style,” Jurado says. “I thought it would be really cool to eventually work in a marketing position.”
Although she was accepted into larger schools, Jurado chose Rider at the recommendation of her father, who encouraged her to look at Rider because of its reputation for business, and the small, intimate academic experience. Her high school class was composed of only 50 students.
In addition to deepening her passion for marketing, Jurado says her experience at Rider helped her become a leader, especially through her participation with the University’s Leadership Development Program. The program combines traditional academic learning with intensive skill training and supervised leadership experience through co-curricular activities, experiential learning, fieldwork and community service.
“I thought leadership was something you were born with, and I believed I was not born with it,” Jurado says. “But I decided to go with it. I learned leadership is a skill that can be developed, and especially when you have the right tools. I see that in myself now.”