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The world, through the eyes of Sarah Zarember ’24, is a truly colorful one.

In a typical office filled with people in traditional business attire, she’s the one sporting a purple blazer with bright gold buttons and a sparkling purple pony pendant. Her trademark turtle keychain dangling from her purse is hard to miss, along with a rainbow-dotted mouse pad and purple keyboard at her workspace.

Never one to blend into the crowd, Zarember has worn many hats during her time at the ������Ƶ School of Management: University Road Map intern, senior advisor for the Management Consulting Group, DJ for the campus radio station, financial officer for the student-run AeroBing Rocketry Research Group, founding intern at Mountainview Jams, and graduate mentor to more than 75 undergraduate business students.

In March 2025, Zarember earned top-tier recognition: a SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Student Excellence.

“I feel like the ultimate overachiever,” Zarember happily confesses. She loves brainstorming new ideas, especially when it comes to big-picture concepts, and finding creative solutions in areas that are historically more analytical. One of the areas where she’s excelled is using her business and marketing prowess to guide others toward achieving what she adoringly calls “your 2.0 version.”

In 2024, Zarember launched “Suit Up with Sarah,” her first of two business ventures. She provides career consulting services to help job seekers overcome insecurities about their professional identity.

“People can be terrible at marketing themselves and not for lack of effort, but because they’re overwhelmed and don’t really know what is going to click with prospective employers,” said Zarember, who is graduating in December with her Master of Business Administration. “Once you find your personal brand, and you grow so comfortable in it that you start to not really care about the negative perception so long as you know that you’re putting your true foot forward, it’s completely transformative to your mindset.”

Working virtually or in person with clients — she has had approximately 10, most of whom are from her native New Jersey and range from professionals in their early 20s to seasoned workers in their 50s looking for fresh starts —Zarember finds unique ways to refine their skills. She gives feedback on resumes, conducts mock interviews, polishes LinkedIn profiles and even shares advice on the best attire for a job interview.

Zarember has found that confidence is a common obstacle for almost anyone looking for a job. Young people, in particular, rely on short-form media as a primary means of entertainment. That’s advantageous at times, she said, but it also can make it difficult for them to communicate effectively.

“There is such power to having conviction in what you say,” Zarember said, “whether it’s the confidence expressed in written communication, the confidence expressed in verbal communication, even the confidence being expressed in nonverbal communication.”

After graduation, Zarember will join Strategy&, the strategy consulting business unit of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), where she previously interned. She describes it as a “tiny practice within a small part” of the massive multinational PwC firm, which happens to reflect everything she has come to love about being a SOM student.

“I love being in SOM because I love feeling like a big part of a small part of a big picture,” she said. “This school has, in my opinion, the best career services department in the country and the beauty of SOM’s well-rounded curriculum is that it’s very good at teaching you how to master all the different disciplines you theoretically will need in order to be really good at your job.”

But before leaving Binghamton, Zarember laid the groundwork for her second business venture, which she co-founded with her brother, Adam, also a SOM student. They developed the prototype for an app called LocalLists, which customizes a person’s grocery shopping experience.

Inspired by their mother’s price-conscious shopping habits, they designed LocalLists as a tool to quickly price-check a person’s entire shopping list across multiple area stores and help shoppers find the most favorable deals while flagging items not suitable for allergies or dietary needs.

Their idea was among those to win the regional round of this year’s New York Business Plan Competition, and if successful, they hope to launch it in the Binghamton area to address population gaps in food availability. The app could also help filter shopping by dietary restrictions or preferences.

“People with dietary restrictions or severe food allergies, like myself, can take comfort in knowing that if they initially intended on getting a specific item on their list that wasn’t going to be right for them, they can save the heartbreak, the time and potential safety risks,” Zarember said. “The retailers we partner with can also benefit from having increased data insights into who exactly is taking ‘the bite’ when they put these digital coupons out.”

It might seem ironic that someone who likes to keep as busy as Zarember isn’t thinking about where she’ll end up in 10 years. She made herself a “bucket list” to leave college with no regrets and to throw herself into everything that she possibly could, but taking the time to appreciate every experience for what it offers is just as important to her.

“I’m not a believer in searching for exit opportunities,” she said, “because if you’re constantly looking for the what’s next before you’ve finished enjoying the present, you’re going at it with the wrong mindset.”

Her world, after all, is a varied and colorful one.