She means business

Haley Cohen has known since the first day of her senior year where she will work after graduation from Tulane University on Saturday (May 17).

Haley Cohen, a double major in marketing and management, begins her new job with L"Oreal USA in New York City in August. (Photo by Paula Burch-Celentano)

The native of Scarsdale, N.Y., Cohen is a double major in marketing and management in the A. B. Freeman School of Business, with a minor in psychology.

She owes much of her career planning to her parents, both business people, who had been through it with her older sister and brother. They urged her to sign up for an internship after her first year at Tulane.

Initially drawn to the world of fashion, Cohen was a public relations and marketing intern with clothier Magaschoni. The next summer, she had an internship at Kiehl"s, a sub-brand of L"Oreal.

“I fell in love with my internship,” Cohen says. “I worked on a small, close-knit team and had a lot of responsibility.”

Both internships were unpaid, but they led to an even more important internship after her junior year. She applied to L"Oreal and went to “a big recruiting weekend in New York City with about 1,000 applicants, 80 percent girls. I knew they tend to hire their interns.” She beat out the competition for a paid internship with L"Oreal Paris in New York.

Cohen was assigned to a brand and spent 50 percent of her time on a business plan for relaunching a product.

“I felt like an employee of the company. And they are going to use some of my ideas in the relaunch.”

Before she starts her job in August, Cohen plans to study for the GMAT exam. She knows that to advance in her career at a company L"Oreal, she will need to earn her MBA. And one day, she"d like to launch her own company.