Jenna Thibodeau '24: Writing Studies Alumni Spotlight
Navigating the Post-Graduation Job Search: How Jenna Thibodeau Landed a Full Time Position She Loves
by Sevanah Sandoval '28
Jenna Thibodeau ‘24 started out with a part-time position she only intended on keeping until she could find another job, but she ended up loving it and landing a full time position. The job search process, while difficult, taught her an important lesson about finding work post-grad: no job is beneath you.
Jenna Thibodeau graduated from Saint Mary’s College in 2024 with a Bachelor’s in English and the Professional Writing Certificate. During her time at Saint Mary’s, she was heavily involved with the campus community, connecting with other English majors as co-leader of English Underground, working as a writing adviser in the Center for Writing Across the Curriculum with her roommates, and dancing with the Spirit Team. She spoke about her time as a Gael very fondly, saying Saint Mary’s “was the perfect, perfect school for me.” Jenna said that the “small class size experience” and “big time sports feel” available at Saint Mary’s greatly enhanced her experience.
Now, Jenna works on the operations team at Sequoia Capital, a venture capital company, where she does receptionist and offsite planning work. She explained venture capital companies as “a team of investors” who “new-stage to middle-stage companies come and pitch their ideas” to. When companies receive investments, they get the benefit of booking Sequoia Capital’s office spaces, which is where the planning aspect of Jenna’s job comes from. She explained that her work largely centers around guest experience, and she’ll do things like order office furniture and select what snacks and amenities are in the rooms.
In the time she has held this job, Jenna has learned a lot about skills that are vital in the workplace, with some of surprising importance. The most valuable skill that Jenna has observed is interpersonal communication. She said that getting along with your team, manager, and even other departments makes you “very, very valuable,” because often, investors are doing business with people not because they have the best idea, but because they are personable and great to talk to. This is not to minimize the quality of work, which she said is still “so important,” but Jenna made it very clear that the quality of work is only some of the effort. She shared that to succeed, “you really need to be a good person and you have to connect well with everybody.”
Jenna shared how her studies as an English major and Professional Writing certificate recipient allowed her to enter her career with relevant skills. She said that her manager and one of her teammates have complimented her emails for being incredibly well written several times, which she says she owes to Saint Mary’s. Specifically, she explains that the writing certificate taught her how to write concisely, which has been integral to effective emails.
Even though she came into the workplace with many valuable skills, Jenna also learned some skills on the job. She shares that this isn’t a bad thing, rather just a reality of starting a new job because the workplace is “a completely different world” from college. She emphasized that it's okay to learn on the job–it doesn’t mean you are unqualified, it is a part of the process.
During our interview, Jenna shared that her job search was a long process of endurance and some heartbreak along the way. She began looking for jobs in April of her senior year, applying for all kinds of administrative, receptionist, and operations roles. She said she got into “a steady routine of applying for ten to fifteen jobs a day” because the job market is so competitive. She said that there were two jobs she was "completely in love with” that didn’t end up working out, which was “so, so crushing.” Even with difficult losses, Jenna shared that she ended up where she was meant to be, and that with persistence, other recent graduates navigating a competitive job market will too.
When she first interviewed for the job she now holds, it was offered to her as a part-time contractor role. When she received this news, she was a little disappointed because she was hoping for a full time position. But, because the job search had gone on for so long, she decided to take the job to get some corporate experience while she searched for a full time job elsewhere. She started out doing the work nobody else wanted to do, like turning conference rooms and stocking the fridge.
Taking on this job that she didn’t want led Jenna to her current, full time job, explaining that “There was a girl on my team who ended up leaving, so there was a spot open…I was talking to my manager and I was saying, I really, really am liking it here. I would love that opportunity. And about a month later, they brought me on full time.” She told me this taught her that “in post-grad, you can’t be picky” and that “There’s really no job that should be beneath you in any way…anything that’s saying yes to you, you should say yes to it.”
Being open to the work that not everyone wants to do is important in a competitive job market. Her final advice to anyone navigating the job market right now is to “Be open to everything, be a good person, and become friends with everybody at your job” because “if you do that well, it’s going to lead to more things.”