Marketing @ a large national railroad

Maybe not the best spot for this post but since there is a decent amount of commodities guys on the trading forum i’ll put it here.

Recently got a job offer on a commercial analyst team for a large national railroad company (think CSX, Union Pacific, Norfolk Southern, and BNSF). Basically the work would revolve around business development / managing relationships with customers, pricing freight, and other market research stuff.

Wondering if anyone here has experience with a role like this? Would love some insight on the work you do on a daily basis. Also wondering how this role would stack up for b school admissions and what exit opps may look like (possible to get into freight trading through this role?)

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Guess I'm getting truly old when I'm starting to forget some of that stuff. Interned at one of the aforementioned railroads in their marketing group some time back. Gist of it as you noted is maximizing your pricing for your lines so looking at competition from other railroads, trucks/transload, etc and setting the pricing structure for public (tariff) rates and for private contracts. Day to day I seemed to get the impression of info gathering such as tracking volume pace for rebate programs, reviewing contract/capex proposals, rate setting, etc. Never thought folks were dealing with a lot of back office jazz like chasing down payments but you did sometimes do a little logistics work like helping get eta from ops folks if they never got in touch with your customers. Nothing overly dumb you're dealing with day to day but you aren't doing anything crazy intellectual either. Knew some folks that ended up going to fine biz schools after a stint there but I don't think I knew a single person besides myself who ended up trading either from intern cohort or as an experienced employee.

 

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