Dressed in well-pressed shirts, blouses and slacks, a crowd of spruced-up University of Maryland students gathered around each other in excited conversation on a recent Thursday night.
For a campus better known for lecture halls and pulling all-nighter study sessions, they weren’t going to a career fair or a professional mixer, but to the Catholic Student Center for a different kind of career formation that blends the corporate world with Catholic faith.
The newly launched Catholic Business Terps aims to bring together students and “lead future professionals to live the Gospel and live for Christ in their everyday lives,” according to its mission statement.
Through networking events, mentorship, and talks, the club is forging opportunities where future entrepreneurs, business leaders and changemakers can explore what it means to build careers rooted in the Lord.
On Thursday, Feb. 5, the Catholic Business Terps officially kicked off the club with a panel of alumni and faculty focusing on how to live your faith in the workplace.
“We see so many students from [the Robert H. Smith School of Business] come around the CSC, and we want students to grow in deeper relationships with Christ while also preparing for the postgrad life,” said the CSC’s student body president, Luz Gaytan. “Business is a language, and you want to connect with people. As Catholics, we are called to love and serve, so we thought we needed some sort of club to help bring those two things together!”
Paige Rienzo, the development and administration coordinator for the Catholic Terps, said she got the initial spark from connecting with the large Catholic network in the area.
“I was thinking to myself, and I was just like, ‘wow, there’s a lot of business school students here,’” Rienzo said. “At the same time, I’m having conversations with these students, I was starting to go to Catholic Business Network of Montgomery County events. I was thinking about Catholic networking and how we could do that here.”
More than three dozen students and UMD community members attended the panel, which was led by Mattie Bonavia, a UMD marketing professor; Chris McGrath, a CFO at W.R. Grace; Courtney Clarke Lodico, a major account manager at DCA Technology Partners; and Chris Deshrochers, a software engineer at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Topics ranged from career discernment, how to make your faith present in the workforce and keeping your focus on God rather than material wealth, though one of the main focuses was about keeping daily prayer habits and practices alive.
McGrath suggested creating and sticking to a daily prayer schedule.
“If I don’t get prayer time in the morning, then it’s not gonna happen. Between work and kids, once you get to the end of the day, it’s not going to be a very high-quality prayer experience,” McGrath said. “... If it's a bumpy day at work or if you’ve had a difficult conversation with a coworker, just taking a breath and trying to love that person in that experience as opposed to wanting to yell… isn’t gonna be good for anybody. It’s about trying to find that right balance.”
Freshman accounting major Erin O’Donnell joined the Catholic Business Terps executive board because she feels like the group offers a community to develop deep friendships.
“I’m interested in hearing about how business and faith can work together, because often in the Smith school, it’s focused solely on the secular side of business, and it can be really hard not knowing how your faith can play into that,” she said. “[The Catholic Business Terps] makes this smaller and creates authentic relationships with each other, which is the core of business.”
(Elizabeth Polo is a journalism student at the University of Maryland and is a contributing writer to the Catholic Standard.)
