Pipe Dream interviewed the four speakers featured at this year’s TEDxBinghamtonUniversity event, themed “Refractions,” which centered around the exploration of unique ideas and new perspectives.
Sarah Zarember ‘24 graduated from the School of Management and is pursuing a Master of Business Administration while also focusing on her consulting company, “Suit Up with Sarah.”
As a musician, Zarember approaches marketing and leadership through a creative lens. She aims to learn, grow and gain confidence through all of her unique experiences and encourages other developing professionals to do the same. Her interview responses have been slightly edited for clarity.
Q: Do you want to give some background on how the opportunity to give a TEDx talk came up?
A: “I’ve been watching TED talks and TEDx talks since I was 7 years old, as part of a program through my elementary school that my gifted and talented teacher was in charge of running. So it’s always been a lifelong dream of mine to actually go and give a TED talk myself. And my freshman year of college, that was 2021, I saw the applications go out for the TEDx speakers, but at the time, I didn’t think that I was qualified in anything, including life, enough to actually stand up in front of the world and talk to people about what I find important.
So, I passed up the opportunity, and then I did it again my sophomore year and then I did it again my junior year. Then for the last semester of my senior year, where I graduated this past December, I decided that I was going to treat the whole year kind of like a bucket list where I was going to just throw my name in the ring of every single opportunity that excited me, and this was top of the list. So I ended up submitting my first five minutes through the application process. I got selected for an interview on Black Friday, and then within a couple days, I got notified that I was this year’s graduate student speaker.”
Q: It says on your LinkedIn that you’re an “arts kid turned business major.” Can you talk about how you ended up on that trajectory and how that might give you a unique perspective and approach to marketing, compared to people who take a more traditional route?
A: “I had huge, huge imposter syndrome when I got to school because I was inundated with all of these super-talented kids in my SOM class, who had done DECA and participated in so many business classes and case competitions. And in my public school in New Jersey, we did not have the opportunity to take business classes by the time we got to college. So, going to business school for me was the result of a mental dilemma that I had with myself, where I knew that I really wanted to prioritize being financially stable in the future, but I don’t like needles or science, so that kind of ruled out the doctor thing. And I love reading, but not anywhere near enough to become a lawyer.
So for me, that kind of left business school as it was. I am a musician. I DJ at the campus radio station twice a week. I play seven instruments, and I founded the internship program over at Mountainview Jams, just as a testament to what I’ve accomplished on campus musically. But I think that being a creative in a business space gives you really interesting insight, just because you are used to dealing with very ‘type B’ people in general, as opposed to dealing with ‘Type A’ people. I like to describe myself as a ‘type A person with type B interests,’ where I’m a very, very stick-to-the-schedule, super neurotic individual, but all of my interests lie in music and the creative arts.
So it’s given me this interesting insight, where for my business friends I’m the super weird, chill, creative person, and for my artsy friends, I’m the super uptight business person, and trying to just navigate that has been super fun.”
Q: How have your extracurricular experiences helped you develop your professional skills, including in unexpected ways?
A: “I love to wear a lot of hats, and I’ve always been the type of person to wear a lot of hats. I don’t know who I am without trying very consciously, to force myself to be in a position where I’m a multifaceted person. And I think that constantly participating in all of these things, I don’t need any of them. I landed the job I’m going to full-time after school when I was 19 years old, and theoretically, there was absolutely zero resume incentive for me to be pushing myself. I really like to be in spaces with people who think differently than I do but in a way that we can all bond and work together.
So when I’m CFO of the Rocket Club, I’m constantly in the lab with a bunch of Watson engineers; they encourage me to take a different creative perspective than when I’m managing the Consulting Group, and they encourage me to take a way different perspective than when I’m managing Mountainview jams.
Because the lessons that you learn when you’re in the Fabrication Lab, obviously, are very different than those that you’re going to learn at the amphitheater or those that you’re going to learn in a boardroom when you’re wearing a suit. And I think that when you’re constantly involved in a bunch of different stuff, it just forces you to be a cooler person because you’re constantly expanding your worldview with people that you wouldn’t have necessarily interacted with if you stayed inside the bubble that you were kind of meant to.”
Q: Do you feel like there’s an incentive to join things that are only resume builders or look good in a certain way?
A: “I think that there’s a super problematic conflation, especially with undergraduate business majors, with needing to do everything so perfectly to spice up your resume or spice up your LinkedIn and to participate in things just so that you can say that you did it. And I definitely fell into that for a time too. I look back at the sheer number of extracurriculars that I can’t even fit on my resume and wonder why on earth I did it, but at the end of the day, I’ve learned to constantly, just continuously, reevaluate what’s important to me.
I think that because the job market right now, especially in my field of consulting, is so tight, people feel enormous pressure, even as freshmen in college, to know exactly what they want to do and take all of the perfect steps in order to get them there when they forget that the thing that’s going to make you stand out the most to employers is being an authentic, real, genuine, multifaceted person with interests that people think are cool.
The amount of times I’ve talked about random extracurriculars in my resume, probably zero times. In an interview, they want to hear about my music. They want to hear about my time as a camp counselor and how that influenced the way that I lead teams. They want to know about the things on my resume that I did for me rather than doing them for career advancement.”
Q: So your talk will be centered around the intersection of product marketing and personal branding. How did you land on that topic, and what are you hoping that the campus community takes away from hearing about it?
A: “I think that Gen Z has a major self-marketing problem. I think that especially growing up with our formative late high school and early college years being completely interrupted by COVID, it really did a major dent in the way that we interact with people, and I think it stunted a lot of people socially.
And because we are such an anxious, low self-esteem generation, where we’re constantly told in the news that there’s this thing that might implode the world and this thing that might implode the world, it’s really hard to stay optimistic. So one thing that we’re really, really good at, outpacing benchmarks left and right as a generation, is on the money front — we make up so much of the GDP, we spend money so well.
TikTok Shop owns us. You know, we have so many people who are just willing to constantly spend money and spend money because we don’t necessarily care as much about the future. And I say ‘we’ generally, but very few people know how to take the transferable skill set from analyzing what it is about these products and services that make them appealing to us in the first place, and tailoring that to how we present ourselves.
And I think that there’s a lot to be learned from how these companies, where they pay their marketing executives hundreds of thousands of dollars, get us to spend money so well, and how we can use that in order to make ourselves a more confident generation. I think that people can hopefully take away from my talk that there’s a bunch of self-reflection to be done for anyone, regardless of where you’re at, but that it’s okay to think that the world is scary.
It’s just equally important to make sure that you’re constantly doing the necessary, I call it ‘internal auditing work,’ to make sure that you’re upskilling yourself and being the best person that you can be.”
Q: What has it been like starting your own company? Are you able to elaborate more on the mission of Suit Up with Sarah and how it relates back to your talk and the whole idea of personal branding?
A: “So, Suit Up with Sarah was born when I was actively procrastinating on a final paper that I had to do at the end of finals during the fall 2024 semester, with the name being born from telling my little brother, who’s now a freshman here, that I was going to be starting my own career consulting company after mentoring almost 100 students at the undergraduate level. And he was like, ‘Oh, okay, well, I guess it’s time to suit up.’ And I thought that it sounded cute because I love a good alliteration.
So starting my own company has been weird because I feel like calling yourself an entrepreneur has a weirdness kick to it. I’ve always had very entrepreneurial tendencies, but never have I actually taken the steps to go and find my own mission.
I have my own little crafts company that I started in high school — never really put the effort that I needed to go into marketing to get it to take off. I was able to highlight a pretty specific market need in the sense that I felt that people felt generally lost when it came to how to put their best foot forward professionally, which ties itself directly into the lens of my talk because I feel like it’s the thing that I can actually talk to people about with sincerity.
I started it with the expectation that most of the clientele that would be coming my way were college students or the neurotic parents of college students who would want to solicit my services to kind of light a fire under people who need a little spark in order to get into the job market to do internship searches and to upscale their resume, LinkedIn and interview skills so that by the time they land these interviews, they do well in them.
Instead, what I found is that there’s a tremendous market of 30- and 40-something marketing executives where they’re too removed from school to have been given the necessary knowledge on how A.I. has changed the job landscape, and they’ve made up almost my entire clientele to date. So I think it’s been really interesting trying to navigate how I would coach an 18-year-old really anxious School of Management freshman through creating their first resume and applying those exact same principles to people that have been in the job force for 10, 15, 20 years, and how it still resonates the same way because we, as people always have that underlying anxiety baseline when it comes to putting our best foot forward professionally, in an environment that’s normally super, super anxiety-inducing for anybody, regardless of their normal comfort level.”
Q: Was that surprising to you?
A: “Shocking. And it’s so odd to me, especially as a recent graduate thinking that there’s anything that I can offer these people and that they see me as a real adult and as a peer, rather than just some college kid. It’s been a really interesting foray into young adulthood for me because it’s been not only super influential for my clients, who I’ve been really lucky to have gotten exclusively super positive feedback so far on my services but also for me as a person, because I think it’s helped me grow as a professional and having real-time exercise in practicing what I preach.
The imposter syndrome exists even for the people who preach it to you. And the fact that people have confidence in me and my services in order to keep on soliciting them, regardless of if I’m decades younger than they are, is super cool.”
Q: What do you find most rewarding about being in a leadership role? Additionally, why focus specifically on consulting?
A: “I learned to do consulting kind of by accident. I participated in one of the mandatory case competitions my first semester at the business school. We had four or five of them. My team, which was comprised of my randomly assigned roommate, a guy across the floor, one of my suitemates and then a girl who lived two floors up — we ended up coming in second place in the competition.
I really enjoyed the slide design behind it, because I always thought that desk jobs were gonna be a little boring, and that was my concern with coming to business school in the first place. I wanted to be a sparkly, colorful individual, and I wanted to do that regardless of if I had a color or not.
So the fact that I was able to use my sparkly skill set when it came to something that was very ‘businessy’ was super appealing to me, and I ended up applying to something called the Consulting Development Program, which is run through our Management Consulting Group. Now I can say I’ve officially risen through all the ranks of it and went from being a participant to an Education Committee member to the vice president and now becoming the senior adviser to my old committee, which has since split into two.
So with consulting, you’re professionally brainstorming. That is your job. That is what you’re tasked to do. And I think that it’s super empowering, because it forces you to not only think creatively, but think critically. So I think that it’s really inspiring from a creative perspective, to go into a room of people that have been taught so consciously to think a certain way and to come at it with a new angle and a fresh set of eyes and to introduce different opinions into a room.
Because I think it’s super awesome watching people develop into themselves. I think that leadership and consulting — the two tenants of my primary concentration in undergrad — kind of go hand in hand with the driver being that I love people. People constantly ask you, ‘What do you want to do? What do you want to be when you grow up?’
My answer’s certainly changed many times over time, and when I was 5 years old, it certainly wasn’t a private equity strategy consultant, like absolutely not. I ended up there. I didn’t necessarily aspire to be there until I knew what it was, and then I aspired to be there.
The leadership piece is awesome, because I enjoy working with people more than I enjoy working with numbers, and, frankly, more than I enjoy working with anything. So when you’re a leader, no matter what discipline you’re working in, you’re constantly being forced to interact with others at different levels. You’re learning from the top down. You’re learning from the bottom up, and you’re constantly getting new perspectives, not only from different people’s diverse viewpoints but also from different levels of an organization.
I think that my favorite thing out of all of the many extracurriculars through undergrad and now through my time here in the MBA program has been being a mentor. And whether this is a mentor at the radio station, a mentor in our Management 111 or a first-year seminar mentor in this new graduate mentorship pilot program that I’m a part of, I love watching people come in scared and anxious and leave refreshed and confident that they have the skills in order to succeed.
I think that everyone has the skills to succeed, but very few have the necessary support system in order to make them flourish. I was very fortunate to grow up in essentially a two-parent stay-at-home household where my father worked from home and my mother was a stay-at-home mom, constantly encouraging me that it didn’t necessarily matter where I ended up, but whatever I was going to do, I was going to do it well, and I was going to have people behind me.
I think that if more people were given the opportunity to have that same support system, then everyone would feel a lot more confident in their ability to progress, not just professionally, but also personally.”
Q: Do you have any additional thoughts, comments, messages that you want to say, about your talk, just about like your career in general, really anything?
A: “I think that it’s really okay to not know what you want to do, but I would recommend trying to perform an internal audit and really get to the bottom of what makes you tick. If that’s participating in a certain passion exercise, find a way to integrate that into your day-to-day life.
No matter what it takes, you want to constantly make sure that you’re providing yourself an opportunity to engage with the people, activities and places that make you feel like the best version of yourself. And it’s totally fine if your day job is not your passion project. It’s so okay; it’s not necessarily mine either. That doesn’t make you any less successful of a person, and other people shouldn’t think that either.”