Strong Interest Inventory

After starting out my freshman fall semester at Lehigh as an engineer and then changing into the business college during my spring semester, I am still unsure of where exactly I want to be. The Strong Interest Inventory helped reveal my strongest areas and showed me which jobs best suit my interest and personality, but this test alone should not decide what major and job I pursue. I know that I need to experience what a real job is like to find what career best fits me. I cannot learn about what career I will enjoy most simply from taking the Strong Interest Inventory or from studying and taking tests in college, there is much more to finding the right job than just that. Once I started thinking about who I should choose as my mentor to

My top five interest areas (taxes and accounting, athletics, office management, sales, and finance and investing) were about what I expected as my best fitting areas, but I was surprised that my strongest occupation was an optician, especially because the other jobs listed after it were quite different than that (credit manager, accountant, buyer, financial analyst). Since my top five interest areas hit on a few different parts of business (management, finance, accounting, and sales) I figured that I should pick a mentor that is proficient in not only these fields, but also in other fields of business, just so I can get a taste of many business fields. Then I realized: To get an overview of all the areas in business, who better to select as my mentor than the president of a company? Every day presidents deal with situations that involve management, financing, marketing, accounting, and many other areas of business. When I tried to think of who my mentor could be, I looked for someone with a position that would at least partially match my top interest areas and suggested occupations from the inventory. I thought about smaller businesses on a local level, something where it would be easier for me to see the entire business as a whole rather than just one part of it. All of a sudden it hit me: Mr. Scott Pino, President of Coopersburg Sports, a local

This is by far what I am most excited about, being able to see how each individual part of the company works together. The first thing I would like to learn about is how the bats are produced from the beginning works to the finished product (I would like to learn about how all of the products are produced, but mainly the bats because those have been the company’s signature product for a long time). It is one thing to watch how goods are made on shows like How It’s Made on the Discovery Channel, but it is a completely unique experience to be able to be stand in the plant watching the products being produced right in front of me (maybe I will even get a chance to help make one of the bats.) After watching the full production process, I would like to learn about what all Mr. Pino accomplishes on a daily basis. Since it is a smaller company, I am not sure if he works on many company tasks such as financing and accounting, or if he spends most of his time taking a step back and working on managing the company as a whole. If he does not work on accounting or financing (two of my top interest areas), I could ask him to let me talk to one of his employees that takes care of those duties just to see what all is involved with recording transactions and managing the company’s finances. Hopefully I could sit in on a meeting if they hold any, I