Facing an increasingly competitive job market, business students may wonder how they can stand out after graduation. Some students at the BYU Marriott School of Business are turning to the Marriott Student Review to diversify their skillset and gain communication and leadership experience to boost them along their professional journey.
The review is produced by the Management Communication 420 class, which is open to students inside and outside of BYU Marriott. Instead of learning through lectures and note-taking, students in the class benefit from a workplace-modeled environment—complete with management leadership, team structures, deadlines, deliverables, and cross-team collaboration—as they work to create and print a magazine, maintain a website, and produce two podcasts, all focused on current business topics.
Marianna Richardson is an adjunct professor of management communication who has built the class from the ground up. She describes the course as a “fun job” and feels the experiential environment gives students valuable experiences that prepare them for real-world employment.
The class’s experiential nature motivated Josh Clawson, a marketing junior from Salt Lake City, to take the course three times after his first experience in winter 2023. “It’s been a place where I’ve been able to learn a lot,” he says.
Clawson has worked his way up from marketing team member to marketing team lead and currently to the managing editor position, honing his leadership skills and his ability to learn from mistakes along the way. “If I fail, I know it’s not the end of the world, and Dr. Richardson will coach me to be better the next time,” he shares. “Having that platform has been really great for my growth as a future leader.”
Ivan Galindo, a Provo native and a senior studying business management, was recruited by a roommate to assist with the review’s Spanish podcast, Las Caras del Éxito—which Richardson added in 2020 to better represent and reach a diverse student audience. Galindo has enjoyed sharing business success stories from members of the Latino community while also refining the leadership skills that come from working on a close-knit team. “Because we’re a small team, everybody has a leadership opportunity—we all have to step up,” he says.
The skills that students learn in the class benefit them after graduation too, explains Liz Dixon, an associate professor who oversees all management communication classes at BYU Marriott. “I’ve had accounting students, finance students, and marketing students who’ve been in Marriott Student Review come back and say they are more valued in their organizations because of the knowledge that they gained in that class,” Dixon says. “Their experiences in the class helped differentiate them in the workplace.”
In Richardson’s view, one of the skills that sets members of the Marriott Student Review apart after graduation is their ability to communicate. “I find that the power of communication is what makes a business,” she says, “and it is so important for business students to understand how to communicate in different ways.”
Clawson has appreciated the growth of his own communication skills throughout his experience working on the review. He recalls instances where he’s reached out to the college deans, saying, “It’s been really good for me as a young student to have to reach out to the people who are higher up and to communicate and be effective.”
Because Galindo is often thinking of the podcast—who to interview and what questions to ask—he feels he has learned to get to the deeper meanings behind peoples’ statements and stories. “It’s helped me to communicate on a level that I didn’t know was possible,” he says. “When you’re constantly thinking of individuals as well as the final product that you want, it changes how you view your day to day—and how you create a better product.”
On top of sharpening their communication skills, students in the class are integrating the BYU Marriott vision, mission, and values into their publication by including articles about the values in each issue. “These students practice respect, integrity, excellence, and faith in Christ in their writing, no matter what they’re publishing and where they are,” Dixon says. “They are practicing the values through what they’re doing in Marriott Student Review.”
For Clawson, the values have extended farther than the pages of the review—they are becoming part of his outlook: “As I’m hunting for an internship this summer, I’m in search of the most perfect, excellent internship. And it’s a process to get there—like our magazine. It takes editing, it takes time. It takes second drafts and revisions. Realizing that the pursuit of excellence, like the class, requires time and effort, has been huge for me.”
He adds, “We’re on this quest of excellence, and I feel like this class is a platform to learn excellence.”
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Written by Sarah Griffin Anderson