Tokyo Calling

After talking with friends and professors, she changed majors from Entrepreneurship to a double major in Information Systems and Marketing with a concentration in Big Data and Analytics. By the time she finished last May, she had become a teaching assistant, instructing fellow undergraduates in Excel and Access, and won several departmental awards. Now she’ll be leveraging those skills back home in Tokyo, where, this fall, she starts a job at PwC, one of the Big Four accounting/consulting firms.

While it’s true she is a native Japanese speaker and knows Tokyo well, Hirate thinks the real reason she got the job was because of her training at Suffolk.

“I think PwC appreciated interviewing a student who had learned how to read data while at college,” says Hirate via Skype from Romania, where she’s teaching English for the summer. “I was happy to hear from them that what I learned in college was meaningful. I feel like I can start a step or two ahead of other new hires.”

Hirate begins her new job on October 1, and, as the only Suffolk alumna in an office of 5,000 people, she’s appointed herself Suffolk ambassador.

“I’m so excited. I tell all my friends that I can’t wait to start working,” Hirate says. “I can’t wait to share what I’ve learned at Suffolk…and tell people in Japan why Suffolk is so amazing.”