According to GMAC’s survey, 37% of candidates globally cite changing industries as a career goal when pursuing a graduate business degree. For many, that shift doesn’t happen before they begin to study a certain program. It happens during it, as a result of what they encounter in their environment and hands-on experience.
Beto Bina came to IENYC with a clear intention. At 30, he’d decided to pivot toward work that had direct positive impact on communities and the environment, which led him to the MS in Business for Sustainability & Social Impact. The direction was set. What changed was his understanding of what that direction actually required.
“Trust the learning process. Sometimes we feel lost and anxious about all the possibilities we have, but if you dive deeper into a subject, you’re going to find something that clicks and resonates. To find your path, sometimes you have to jump in the dark.”
That shift rarely happens in a single moment. It builds through company visits: MS in Management students have gone inside NBA headquarters, Google‘s New York office, and Tiffany & Co, guest speakers from industry and public life, and the kind of conversations that happen when your classmates come from 34 countries and have built careers you hadn’t considered.
The cohort matters more than most students expect going in. When every group project involves people with different professional backgrounds, educational systems, and ways of framing a problem, you’re forced to reconsider how you frame yours.
Filomila Kyriaki Letsiou, who came to IENYC from Greece to study MS in Management, noticed this in how the city itself operates.
“People are so mobile here, moving all the time, changing jobs. You need to be able to adapt and always stay open to new opportunities. It might seem like uncertainty, but it’s just an opportunity.”
According to the NYCEDC’s 2025 State of the NYC Economy report, more than one million college students and recent graduates live and work in New York. The peer environment here is unlike anywhere else.
IENYC describes its faculty as academic-practitioners: professionals who are still working in the fields they teach. The MS in Management program director, Dmitri Shuster, spent more than 20 years in international banking, including roles as global head of foreign exchange and regional head of trading for the Americas, before moving into academia.
That kind of background changes what feedback you’re given looks like. A professor who has operated at that level knows the gap between what a career looks like from the outside and what it demands day-to-day. Sometimes that means uncomfortable but well-informed feedback about whether the direction you’re heading actually fits.
A pivot doesn’t mean starting from scratch. It means repositioning, using what you’ve already built to move into adjacent or entirely different territory. IENYC builds structured career support into the curriculum across all three terms, so that when direction shifts, there’s a framework around it rather than a freefall.
Of MS in Management graduates, 100% were employed within four months of graduation, a figure that reflects students navigating a competitive market, often in directions they didn’t originally anticipate.
Career pivots aren’t a detour. In New York, they’re often ecactly the point. The students who get the most out of studying here aren’t the ones who arrived with the most certainty.
They’re the ones who stayed curious when that certainty broke down, engaged with the friction instead of resisting it, and used what the city gave them to make better moves than they could have made before they arrived.
If you’re considering a master’s where the city is as much a part of the curriculum as the studies and research itself, take a look at the MS in Management and MS in Global Business and Sustainability at IENYC.
More common than most people expect. GMAC’s 2023 Prospective Students Survey found that 37% of candidates globally cite changing industries as a career goal when pursuing a graduate business degree. Live projects, company visits, and conversations with peers from 34 countries often reveal that the sector you arrived with wasn’t quite what you imagined. That’s not a setback. It means you’re working with better information than you had when you applied.
New York compresses the timeline. The density of industries and proximity to companies means you encounter real-world signals much faster than elsewhere. A guest speaker or company visit can shift your thinking in ways that take much longer in other environments.
Career support at IENYC is built into the curriculum across all three terms, not offered as a separate service. Faculty who are active practitioners provide honest, field-specific feedback alongside that structure. Of MS in Management graduates, 100% were employed within four months of graduation, navigating a competitive market often in directions they didn’t originally plan for.
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Originally from New Orleans, Louisiana, Ashleigh now calls Madrid, Spain home, where she has built a career shaped by curiosity, creativity, and a lifelong love of languages. Her work grows out of a passion for learning, storytelling, and meaningful cross-cultural connection, with language as the thread that ties it all together.
Her academic journey took her from studying Spanish and French and Secondary Education at the University of Southern Mississippi to graduate studies in Spain, where she completed a Master’s in Spanish at the University of Salamanca and a Master’s in Translation and Interpretation at the University of Alcalá. Along the way, she has worked across classrooms, research projects, and creative spaces, contributing to academic, multilingual, and editorial initiatives that connect language, knowledge, and culture.
