For many college students, graduation day is a time to celebrate the end of a hard-earned degree and the beginning of a new journey. For BYU Marriott graduate Becky Darrington Rogers, graduation day also happened to coincide with a doctor’s appointment for her first pregnancy—a reason to celebrate more than just earning her diploma. Now twenty years later, as a successful businesswoman and a devoted mother, she strives every day to balance her career and her family.
Rogers started her career path as an intern with the Salt Lake Organizing Committee (SLOC) in the early stages of preparation for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics. “I found my love for the hiring process as I worked with SLOC,” she says. “Its human resources department studied ways to organize and select thousands of volunteers, so I researched the ways that previous Olympic games had selected volunteers and wrote up a report for the HR department.”
Rogers graduated from BYU Marriott in 2000 with a degree in business management with an organizational behavior emphasis. She had interests in financial management and the hiring process, but she decided to devote all of her time to her family before pursuing a full-time job. She and her husband are the parents of three daughters. While she wanted to spend some years as a full-time parent, she also planned to re-enter the workforce one day. “I wanted to commit to those early years at home with my daughters,” she says. “But I also knew that I had a lot of years that I could contribute to the world after my daughters had grown.”
Rogers’ opportunity to re-enter the workforce came earlier than she had anticipated when a friend asked her to help with the financial management of his thriving dental practice in Billings, Montana, where Rogers and her family now live. “As a part-time employee, I became an integral part of helping the practice grow as he added more locations,” she says. “When he got enough locations that he needed someone to manage his dental group full-time, I decided to take that position.”
While Rogers worked full-time, her husband provided support in the home as a full-time parent. “My husband and I needed to take care of our family, and the two of us did what was necessary to take care of that family, no matter which role each of us played,” she says. “The reason that I’ve had these career opportunities has been because of my husband’s level of support.”
Currently, Rogers works with Big Sky Economic Development, an organization that provides business growth services for the region and specializes in community development. “We are a small but heavily utilized organization. I strive to ensure that internal operations run smoothly so our team can better focus on serving clients and our community,” she says. “I am a one-person HR department, and I oversee the facility management and day-to-day operations. I am heavily involved with the financial management of the organization and lead the engagement of our thirty-three-member Board of Directors.”
As part of her work, Rogers helps to create opportunities for other people to have internship experiences similar to her own internship with SLOC. “The organization where I work believes strongly in interns and giving people learning and experiences that helps them bridge the gap to their next careers,” she says. “I have a lot of passion for creating meaningful internships for people.”
Rogers is also working as the lead on a project that will aid in the revitalization of the downtown area in Billings. “The organization I work for just bought a one-hundred-year-old building in the heart of downtown Billings, and with the help of a two-million-dollar Federal grant, we’re renovating the building to house a new entrepreneurial development center, a community training center, and our staff offices. It’s an exciting and important project to our community,” she says.
As Rogers continues to help her community and grow her career, her family is still her number-one priority. “I used to spend a high quantity of time with my kids,” she says. “Now I spend less time with them, but my husband and I work to maximize those hours we do have with them to be quality time. I focus less on the number of hours that I spend with my family, and I instead focus on how we spend those hours together.”
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Writer: Kenna Pierce
