Alumni & Friends : Alumni Profiles

Sharing the Eller Experience

Corrina Tang-Saporito
MBA '97

After graduating from the Eller MBA program in 1997, Corinna Tang’s education took an entirely new direction, learning the language and way of life of Germany, where she’d moved with the German boyfriend she’d met and started dating in the Eller MBA program.

She nailed the language in nine months, passing the Goethe Institute’s Intermediate Proficiency German Exam, but other challenges, like grocery shopping, fitting in, and making friends, proved trickier.

“Learning the language was fun,” she recalls. “The real struggles centered more on acclimating to a completely different way of life. I had to remember to bring canvas shopping totes and past egg cartons from home when going for groceries because of the strong emphasis on recycling. And since I was not perceived as a “typical” American, I was mistaken for a mail order bride from Southeast Asia or the department store cleaning girl.”

After spending a year of aggressive but fruitless job searching in Germany when its unemployment had surpassed 11 percent, Corinna made the decision to move back to the United States, settling in New York City. She stayed with an Eller classmate in Queens and had three strong marketing job offers inside a month.

Five years later, Corinna feels like a native New Yorker and credits her Eller experience with helping to smooth the transition. “The culturally, ethnically, and professionally diverse community there resembled the conditions of real business that I would encounter later on,” she says.

Still in marketing, Corinna now works for a Manhattan-based, small private equity firm specializing in targeted, niche-specific private equity funds that offer high absolute rates of return. She and her husband closed on a Manhattan co-op apartment, and in November 2004 celebrated their first wedding anniversary.

And in true Eller fashion, Corinna is also giving back, working with Eller recruiters and helping prospective applicants learn more about what the Eller College has to offer by talking with them at recruitment events.

“The lessons learned at Eller have helped guide and shape my life in the past and will continue to do so in the future,” Corinna explains. “It’s my feeling that sharing my Eller experience with others helps them to make decisions about their own futures. Whether or not they choose Eller, participating in their decision in intrinsically fulfilling to me.”