MBA News 

The journey to becoming the first-ever chief operating officer and chief safety officer for the Natural History Museum of Utah was not one that Abby Curran expected. Curran says she owes her success to the MBA program at the BYU Marriott School of Business and her life experiences that taught her to never stop improving.

Trent Hamilton spends his days building teams of people who drive the medical technology of the future. Whether he’s hiring someone to research treatments for cancer or put together the first FDA-approved treatment for COVID-19, Hamilton’s work brings together the people whose innovations save lives.

The Whitmore Global Business Center at BYU Marriott announced that eleven MBA students were recently recognized as the 2021 Eccles Scholars.

Ten students were named as 2021 Hawes Scholars, an honor that carries the highest distinction given to MBA students at BYU Marriott.

The Brigham Young University Marriott School of Business MBA program has awarded ten students with the 2021 George E. Stoddard Prize, an award given to first- and second-year students in the BYU Marriott MBA program. 

The MBA director at BYU Marriott, Daniel Snow wishes he had a dollar for every time he’s received compliments about his BYU Marriott graduates in the workforce. Since becoming the MBA director in June 2020, Snow has dedicated himself to not only upholding the school’s values and reputation but also fulfilling his personal goal to make a positive impact on the lives of others.

When teaching his class ENT 401: Entrepreneurial Innovation to MBA students, associate professor of entrepreneurship Nile Hatch shares his own method of innovation: developing a deep understanding of others’ needs. With both management and engineering students in the class, Hatch also encourages his students to combine their strengths in teams and support one another’s needs.

BYU Marriott fared well in the recently released U.S. News & World Report 2022 rankings for graduate programs. Both the MBA and MPA programs were ranked, as were four graduate program emphases.

After decades of leading educational institutions such as the Harvard Business School and BYU–Idaho, Kim B. Clark is still sharing intellectual and spiritual knowledge with students as the NAC Professor of Business at the BYU Marriott School of Business. With a career in education that spans more than forty years, Clark considers his work at BYU Marriott to be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream.

During her career in higher education, BYU Marriott alumna Alison Davis-Blake has prized building mentorship relationships with students and colleagues. She loves to see people choose their own educational paths and succeed as professionals.

Whether Christian Hsieh, a BYU Marriott MBA alum, is talking with a veteran of finance or a young employee of a startup, he’s constantly learning something new. Hsieh’s current experiences as the founder of a crypto-asset management startup are just one step on his journey of lifelong learning.

To Uros Stampe, operations manager for doTERRA, success is a journey that comes one step at a time. Each experience Stampe has had—from watching his father work in manufacturing to choosing to attend the BYU Marriott School of Business with fellow Cardon International Scholarship (CIS) students—helped him uncover his interests and gain confidence in the skills he worked diligently to develop. 

Whether he’s flying helicopters across Afghanistan and Iraq or running 100-mile ultramarathons, United States Army Major Jeff Timmons applies lessons about self-improvement and adhering to his values that he learned at BYU Marriott School of Business.

After his younger brother was tragically killed in a motorcycle accident, Easton Johnston decided to reexamine his life. He did so partly to honor his brother and partly to find greater fulfillment in his work. Now an MBA student at BYU Marriott, Johnston looks forward to making a change in his career and making a difference in other people’s lives along the way.

For many students at the BYU Marriott School of Business, recruiting season is a crazy time of trying to balance schoolwork with networking and interviews. Lillian Barton, a BYU Marriott MBA student, navigated all of that during the final weeks of her pregnancy with her second child. In fact, she received job offers in the days immediately before and following his birth. Whether Barton is choosing where to complete an internship or studying for her classes at BYU Marriott, she sees every day as an opportunity to learn and grow.

An all-women team of students from the MBA program at the BYU Marriott School of Business took first place at the Utah Venture Capital Case Competition on 18 November 2020. As part of the competition, students sourced a deal with a company that helps entrepreneurs build mobile apps, gaining skills that will help them build their future careers.

A common theme throughout Joseph van Scheltema’s life is to carry on—through coping with family tragedy, supporting his family as a student, and traveling through a global pandemic. But he doesn’t only carry on for himself. As an MBA student, Van Scheltema hopes his education at the BYU Marriott School of Business will help him reach out and help others as well.

Beginning in fall 2021, the BYU Marriott School of Business MBA program will offer a new specialization: Management Science and Quantitative Methods—STEM Management. The STEM management specialization will be available to all MBA students, regardless of their chosen tracks of study, and will better prepare them for the workforce with specialized skills and a competitive advantage.  

Few people can walk into a store and pick up an item off the shelf that they helped create. Jason Alleger, an MBA alumnus from the BYU Marriott School of Business, can. During his summer 2017 internship with General Mills, Alleger was on the team that researched and developed Nature Valley Wafer Bars for General Mills. Although Alleger has many impressive feats on his résumé, he credits that General Mills internship for being the springboard to his current position as director of consumer insights and strategy with Traeger Grills.

While most people may see COVID-19 as a setback, Ruchika Goel, a recent BYU Marriott School of Business MBA alum, saw the pandemic as the universe telling her to start a company. This isn’t the first time Goel has taken risks: six years ago, she left her home country of India and moved to America. Starting her own company during a global pandemic seemed doable too.