Following in the footsteps of her father and grandpa, Itza Miller came to BYU in 2014 bright-eyed and cougar-tailed, without a clue as to what she wanted to study. As her BYU experience recently came to a close, Miller says she has appreciated the moments that guided her towards the people she calls her strategy family.
Miller, from San Diego, knew she wanted to be at BYU because of the quality of education and the values she had been raised to desire. Over the course of her first two years at BYU, Miller felt an undeniable, yet inexplicable, pull toward the BYU Marriott School of Business. After committing to the idea of business, Miller completed all of the business school application requirements, yet she could not decide which program to apply for.
Initially the strategy program seemed foreign to Miller, but when a friend told Miller that strategy was a “cool combination of everything,” she thought she’d take her chances and apply. During her entry interview, Miller was asked to complete a case problem, using her reasoning skills to solve an issue on the spot. “I came away from the interview more interested in strategy than I was going in!” she remarks.
Miller was accepted into the strategy program and was engulfed in a world of fast thinkers and problem solvers. Diving head first, Miller got involved in the Strategy Club, took on a nonprofit management minor, and lined up a strategy internship at Zions Bank in Salt Lake City during the summer of 2018. Over time, Miller fell in love with the program, but even more so the people within.
The strategy program is a tight-knit program at BYU Marriott. “There are only around forty of us, so we are more like a family because we take all of our core classes together,” says Miller. She developed a desire to empower women in business when she found herself as one of the few women in the strategy program. “The program’s about 85 percent men to 15 percent women, so I’ve learned about the massive difference women make in business,” remarks Miller.
Because strategy covers all of the business bases, students within the program are given many elective choices. “The best thing about the strategy program is how customizable it is,” explains Miller. She chose to take elective classes in marketing, entrepreneurship, and finance. Core classes in the strategy program combine strategy majors and minors, meaning that Miller had the opportunity to learn with an assortment of students from programs all over BYU, including engineering students, teaching majors, and biology undergrads alike.
Looking back on her experiences, Miller knows she has gained much more than a degree. “In the strategy program they teach us how to solve problems, but that transfers over into all aspects of life,” she says. “Business problems, personal problems, life problems, everything. We learn how to break things down and solve them piece by piece.”
Miller looks forward to the future, and will be taking her strategy skills with her. She has recently accepted a job with Cambia Health Solutions as a strategic market insights analyst and anticipates an exciting career. “The strategy program at BYU Marriott taught me that I can tackle really hard problems. That sounds kind of cheesy, but I was shown my full potential.”
_
Writer: Camden Carter
