Millie Rapp reentered the workforce at a cement plant in rural West Texas, where the environment came with its quirks. “We had a bobcat that liked to eat the heads off birds,” she says. “After a rainstorm, I’d sometimes be walking through water with clear reminders of that—things were never boring.”
Rapp, a chemical engineer with experience working in environmental quality, had been hired by the new company owners to bring the plant into compliance. “The work was great,” Rapp says, but as a recently divorced mom with two young boys, she decided to move to Arizona after a year at the plant to take a job at a large power company with more resources for her family.
Her role at the new company was the same, but the experience for her felt very different. “The contrast of those two businesses certainly had an impact on me and sparked my curiosity in business,” Rapp explains. So she applied to the MBA program at the BYU Marriott School of Business.
“The idea of being somewhere I knew was going to help me grow professionally, personally, and spiritually was really appealing,” Rapp says. Her history of having earned her undergraduate degree and run cross country and track at Brigham Young University made Rapp’s return to Provo easier, especially with the support of the program’s single-parent scholarship. But the transition still required delicate scheduling.
“I would get up early to have dedicated time to study so I could be present with my kids when they needed me,” Rapp explains. Then she would head to campus, where she enjoyed learning alongside a diverse group of peers.
As an engineer, Rapp worked mostly with engineers, but in the MBA program, she worked with “a group of people that were very talented in diverse ways, with a lot of interesting experience and expertise,” she says. “And for me, I learned so much from them, and I could see how that diversity benefited all of our projects.”
She also benefited from the MBA program’s network of mentors. When Rapp was part of a student consulting team within the MBA program, she saw a need for more female mentors, and the MBA program had an influx of willing volunteers, including Erin Clark, then-managing director at Deloitte. “She volunteered every Friday to come and mentor women in the MBA program,” Rapp says. “She was very generous with her time. And since she was also a single mother, she was a great mentor and example for me.”
Rapp credits her mentors and time in the program with helping her figure out opportunities after her MBA. “There’s just so much to learn, and the world is your oyster in a lot of ways when you’re kind of starting over,” she says. “I was pretty open—I was trying to find something that sparked my curiosity and would allow me to stretch myself, so I appreciate that BYU Marriott had resources from the professors and the career directors.”
After graduating, Rapp tapped into BYU Marriott’s alumni network and accepted a position working in strategy for Nursa, a startup that helps healthcare institutions find qualified nurses to meet patients’ needs. “I love working somewhere where hard work with my teammates really does change the lives and opportunities of the customers who use it,” Rapp says.
And she has seen how the skills she learned in the MBA program helped her in her role from the beginning. Rapps explains, “The MBA really opened up the door for me to solve more diverse problems and provided so much more flexibility for me and my number one job—being a mom.” Not only does Rapp work from home, but she has also grown within the company because of her depth of learning and experiences in the MBA program.
After starting at Nursa in strategy, Rapp explains how the CEO came to her one day and asked her to step into a different role in product management. “I said, ‘OK, I can do that.’ I felt prepared,” she says.
At Nursa, Rapp led the effort to implement instant pay for nurses and assisted in creating a platform that provides streamlined orientation and education for nurses using the platform. “The fun part,” she adds, “is having the space to be both creative and analytical and say, ‘This is a real problem. What are all the different ways that we can solve it?’ And then getting to own that from beginning to end.”
Rapp attributes the joy she feels as she has moved her career forward to the vision of BYU Marriott and the people in the program. “It’s a life-changing experience to learn business with a Christlike leadership perspective,” Rapp explains. “It’s not just about how successful I can be in my career, but it’s about the person that I want to become.”
