Lorin Killian and his wife, Lindsay, decided on ten days’ notice—just a week before his graduation from the Marriott School—to move to New York City. Killian felt uneasy about declining a job offer in Salt Lake City to move to New York without any job leads. “I was told countless times during my Marriott School MPA days that networking was crucial in all aspects of business,” Killian said. Out of desperation, he sent emails to his network of friends and acquaintances in the Manhattan area.
Within a few hours, Killian received a reply from Richard Johnson, a 2000 Marriott School MAcc graduate and friend of Killian’s from his LDS mission in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Johnson informed Killian that his friend’s wife was looking for someone to fill a position at URS/O’Brien Kreitzberg, a construction management firm. Killian’s initial reaction was, “Construction management? How does that relate to my MPA degree and my background in nonprofit arts?” Killian went ahead and researched the firm anyway, and learned that the majority of its clients are local, state, and federal government entities. “And then I realized that it wasn’t such a stretch and could quite possibly be very interesting,” Killian said.
Killian landed an interview with URS/O’Brien Kreitzberg within twenty-four hours of arriving in the Big Apple and was offered the position of marketing coordinator. As such, Killian is involved with all aspects of proposal production: managing the proposal process, researching, ensuring that submissions comply with government requirements, and writing the proposals. Killian also maintains a database of all marketing activity for URS job sites east of the Mississippi River and assists corporate management with the preparation of marketing reports.
His position at URS has provided him with the finishing touches to his MPA degree. “I now have a very real sense of how for-profit firms interact with government, and that was the missing link in my education,” Killian said. Management in either sector doesn’t seem so daunting to him anymore, thanks to his MPA background and current job.
Killian is grateful for his associations that assisted him in finding a job. He earned a BA in English from BYU in 1998 and an MPA from the Marriott School in 2001.
