Senior Success: Katharine Ilyutovich Will Begin Her Career as a Business Analyst
Ask Katharine Ilyutovich what she will miss most about NJIT after graduating this May and she will promptly tell you “the people.”
“It’s just nice that I can walk in and people will know who I am and just talk to me about whatever,” said the business major, referring to the kinship she has found over the past four years at Martin Tuchman School of Management (MTSM). “It’s just very comforting.”
This connection has not only nourished Ilyutovich during her time at NJIT, it has also led to her involvement in a variety of activities, in many cases in leadership roles. She became a member this academic year of the MTSM Dean’s Executive Student Leadership Council, an elite group that meets monthly to help further the school’s agenda. In addition, she held an e-board position for the Delta Phi Epsilon social sorority, which segued into her serving as secretary and then president of NJIT’s College Panhellenic Council, a student group that oversees recruitment for all of the university’s sororities.
Perhaps her greatest achievement, however, is being named an Avanade Scholar, a true mark of distinction in the business world. Avanade, a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, is an international business consulting and solutions company. Through its generous scholarship program, it invests in young women studying STEM via mentoring, networking and internships. Ilyutovich was part of an MTSM delegation that was invited to Avanade’s prestigious FUEL Innovation, Leadership, and Technology Conference, held in California last year.
“I’m really appreciative for everything they’ve done,” she said of the company. “I’ve met so many people through [the scholarship] and I’ve traveled. … Everyone’s so involved and cares so much about how we’re doing, aside just from school. It’s really great, it’s like a whole little community.”
Looking ahead, she will begin her postgraduation career at Avanade in July in New York City as a business analyst on its finance and operations/enterprise resource planning team. One long-term goal is to obtain her certified financial planner license.
Ilyutovich was raised in Edgewater, N.J., although her family is from Russia. Her parents — mom is a dentist and dad is in international sales — immigrated to Cleveland, Ohio, with her older brother shortly before she was born. They moved to the Brighton neighborhood of Brooklyn, then to Fort Lee and finally settled in Edgewater when she was a third-grader. Growing up, she enjoyed being outdoors and loved to read, often way past bedtime, much to the consternation of her parents.
She also came to be trilingual. In addition to speaking English, she continues to converse in Russian at home, and learned Spanish both at school — in classrooms and clubs — and through a foreign exchange-like program she participated in as a teenager. Spanish actually helped clinch her decision to attend NJIT. When the university held a recruitment event at her high school, the NJIT representative noted her proficiency in the language listed on her transcript and proceeded to conduct a good part of their interview in Spanish.
“That was really cool and very interesting. I felt that NJIT had genuine interest in me and I didn’t really feel that a lot from other schools,” remembered Ilyutovich, who started as a biomedical engineering major and then transferred to business with a concentration in finance at the end of her sophomore year.
Today, as a soon-to-be alumna, Ilyutovich is completing a yearlong, paid internship with the insurance company Crum & Forster. There, she spent this past summer as a rotational intern in underwriting, operations and claims, and the 2019-2020 academic year working three days a week in reinsurance finance and assisting with the data transfer for a systems conversion.
“I’m really excited to say that I’m graduating … but I’m also extremely nervous because this is the first time in my life that I don’t have that security blanket of ’I have school next year,’” she admitted. “But I think I have a good foundation from NJIT to start my life.”
