On a sunny day over spring break, a group of 20 Richmond students spent an afternoon visiting the Golden Gate Bridge and walking around the waterfront town of Sausalito, followed by a ferry ride into downtown San Francisco for dinner.

It sounds like a typical vacation, but this trip was about more than tourist destinations. The students were there for a taste of life in Silicon Valley — experiencing everything from transportation and entertainment to work life at a major tech company.

“A lot of students aren’t prepared for the fast pace of working in a city,” said Ari Emanuel-Wright, assistant director of Career Services and a career advisor for marketing, communications, and entrepreneurship. “It’s an eye-opener. And it’s important for them to experience being there, because it does play a part in how they want to go about their internship and job search.”

That’s the idea behind Spider Road Trips, a program offered by Career Services. Each year, three groups of students travel to New York and San Francisco to experience life in the city and explore the breadth of career options in the fields of finance, marketing, and technology. They meet with alumni and parents at major companies and small firms, and visit organizations that regularly recruit at Richmond.

Spiders on Wall Street takes place over winter break, ahead of the recruitment cycle for junior-year internships. This year, first- and second-year business students spent two days in New York visiting about 10 banks, as well as asset management firms. At the same, another group of students — this one comprising marketing, communications, art, and other related majors — toured major advertising agencies like Wieden + Kennedy, boutique PR firms, museums, Madison Square Gardens, and TikTok.

The two groups intersected the first night for a joint networking reception with New York-area alumni, a key component of every Spider Road Trip.

“It’s a great opportunity for them to network and build relationships with people that work in the industry they're interested in,” said Frank Allen, director of employer relations. “But we also want them to meet as many people as possible and learn that networking is not a hub and spoke. They’re building a web where they’re connected to one person who can connect them to other people.”

The third Spider Road Trip occurred over four days in Silicon Valley, where students toured some of the major players, like Google, Apple, Salesforce, Adobe, and Cisco. But they also explored the area’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, such as start-up accelerators and venture capital firms.

The marketing and technology Spider Road Trips are open to students from any major and year who show a true interest in those industries but don’t yet have a clear path in mind. The experience is meant to be exploratory, opening them up to the variety of possibilities available to them — or helping them rule out some options.

“We take a bird’s eye view,” Emanuel-Wright said. “We hope they either see something that turns on a light bulb — or that they realize something isn’t for them. There are so many options out there; one of the strategies could be to eliminate some of the possibilities, so that they have a smaller universe that’s less overwhelming.”