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Alumni Spotlight Student Experiences
Shannon Francis edged into a seat in the back of her Marriott School Executive MBA classroom, trying not to draw attention to herself since she was among the few not wearing a suit. "Then about twenty minutes late, Steven waltzed in the door in rumpled, wrinkled casual attire, and I said to myself, ‘We could get along!'" Besides that, Shannon was sure that it meant he was single.
Manhattan Investment Banker Credits BYU Scholarships For Career Success For someone who always wanted to be a doctor, a position as vice president of JP Morgan Chase & Co., wasn’t exactly what investment banker Katherine Lum had in mind. She lives and works in Manhattan and is responsible for assisting clients in raising debt securities in the private placement market. Depending on the flow of deals, Lum has been known to work up to twenty-hour days. What keeps her motivated? “I truly enjoy my job,” she said.
For Wyman Roberts, vacationing at Universal Studios proved to be so much fun that he decided to land a career in the industry. Roberts has been appointed executive vice president of marketing—chief marketing officer—for Universal Studios Recreation Group.
Intel business analyst Jason Packham said there might be a correlation between his winnings on ABC's Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and his BYU education. One question asked on the show was, "In which of these languages is the first-person singular subject pronoun always capitalized?" Packham gave the correct answer: English.
When Rob Smoot earned his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, he wanted to shout it from the mountaintops. Smoot celebrated the culmination of his education by leading forty fellow students to Africa's highest point the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro 19,341 feet above the vast African plains.
Peter Christensen launched his writing career as an undergrad working for The Daily Universe. He was promoted from sports reporter to editor and then to editor-in-chief filling numerous other positions while on staff. "If I had my druthers, I might have ended up being a sports writer," Christensen said.
The Marriott School at Brigham Young University named eight MBA candidates as its 2002 Hawes Scholars. The honor, which carries a cash award of $10,000, is the highest distinction given to MBA students at the school.
Krescent Hancock’s daily commute to Foggy Bottom via the metro’s blue line hasn’t gotten old yet. In fact, “each day is a new adventure,” she says.
Kristina Khona may not have children yet, but she probably knows more about baby clothes than most parents. “It’s my job,” she says. Khona is a buyer of infant and newborn clothing for Hecht’s and Strawbridge’s, department stores located in the Eastern region of the United States. Hecht’s and Strawbridge’s—the largest division of the May Department Stores Company—owns and operates eighty department stores in eighteen markets including Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, Norfolk, and Richmond.
Leaping from third to first, this analyst’s bullishness throughout last year was distinctly rewarded. Ted A. Izatt was recognized by Institutional Investor magazine as the No. 1 All-American fixed income analyst for energy. Izatt, senior vice president of Lehman Brothers, Inc., is responsible for credit research coverage of oil and gas on a global basis. He joined the company’s fixed income research department in July 1997.
The alignment of paddle strokes, says David Hanna, is a key component of a successful rafting team. “On the river, the consequence of misaligned members is known immediately—the boat moves to the left or to the right rather than in a straight line,” he said. In the business world, the consequences of misaligned members are not so obvious, but just as harmful in terms of goal achievement, Hanna said.
For one Brigham Young University student, playing the banjo and a passion for soccer seemed worlds apart—until he was invited to play with his bluegrass band at the World Cup this summer in Seoul, Korea.
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.
Several years ago, Sarah Sandberg watched a television program about one-hundred-year-old people. “I got two things out of it—take good care of your teeth, and take the risks,” she said. “I didn’t want to turn one hundred and wish I had taken more risks.”
If a company’s name ever had meaning, it’s Phoenix Footwear Group, Inc. The name stems from the ancient Greek myth of the phoenix rising from the ashes—something the Old Town, Maine, company can relate to.
A team of four accounting graduate students from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School won first place in the national Deloitte & Touche Tax Challenge competition. The school’s undergraduate team placed second in a separate division.
The Marriott School at Brigham Young University announces ten MBA candidates as its 2003 Hawes Scholars. The honor, which carries a cash award of $10,000, is the highest distinction given to MBA students at the school.
Handling clients whose net worth averages $50 million each day is part of Robert Haynie’s job as a principal and Pacific Northwest area leader of Ernst & Young’s advisory practice. Excelling at his job earned him a spot as one of Worth’s 250 top financial advisors in the magazine’s July/August 2002 issue.
Sometimes serious cramming sessions do pay off. Upon graduating with his MAcc, R. Marcus Young took a consulting job in Portland, Oregon. When CPA exam season came, he wasn’t even sure he was going to take it until his brother-in-law convinced him to.
For Jeremy Hanks, being an entrepreneur comes naturally. Even though he’s the founder of a successful dot-com company, that doesn’t keep him from thinking about other possible business ventures. “Right now I have ten different ideas of companies I’d like to start that I think would do well,” he says.
Juggling should be left to professional jugglers, who can sustain objects in air for periods of time. Those who aren’t professional jugglers should work on balancing their lives, instead of juggling them. That’s the philosophy behind Beyond Juggling: Rebalancing Your Busy Life, written by Kurt Sandholtz, Brooklyn Derr, Kathy Buckner, and Dawn Carlson.
Typically, a publisher screaming at an author over the phone would be considered an unpleasant experience, but in Kerry Patterson’s case, it was just the opposite.
Take one accounting alumna, add about fifty more women, one trip to Atlantic City, New Jersey, and what do you get? The Miss America Pageant.
Despite being one teammate short, arriving at the competition with only five minutes to spare and having to begin planning their case in a car by flashlight, a team of three students from BYU’s Marriott School recently placed second at an international business ethics competition.