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Alumni Spotlight Business Management Global Supply Chain
Jonathan DeGraff is quick to point out that his time in the Tanner Building not only gave him a great education but also left him with a strong desire to serve.
Making use of her well-honed business chops, this 1976 BYU Marriott grad has spent retirement focused on improving her community—one creative solution at a time.
What does a BYU Marriott degree and celebrity rock concerts have in common? For alum Jeff Burns, they have everything to do with his profession.
Throughout her education and career, Marriott School alumna Amy Sawaya has used global supply chain as her catchall answer to what she wants to be when she grows up, even as the details of those plans have changed significantly.
Jennifer Rockwood stepped onto BYU’s South Field and gazed numbly across the green turf. “What have I gotten myself into?” she recalls thinking. “Can I really do this?”
Life after graduation has taken them 1,700 miles apart. But drawing on their business savvy, these sisters have found a way to stay close by running The DIY Lighthouse.
Two spandex-clad riders whizzed into the building, disappearing from view. As the BYU Marriott School students and their advisor stepped into the warehouse, the smell of rubber, aluminum, and cardboard—components of freshly manufactured bicycles—welcomed them into biker paradise.
Adam Mikkelsen grew up on a farm in Oregon where, no matter the chore, he was always looking for ways to improve. At BYU he studied economics before switching to global supply chain so he could be more hands-on with his work. As a student, he interned at an industrial auditing firm as an auditing intern, where he traveled across the western Chinese province of Qinghai in order to share best practices and greener technology between the companies there and in Utah. Later, he worked at Walmart as a merchandising analyst for apparel sourcing. He accepted a job as a strategy and operations consultant at Deloitte after graduating in April 2015 because he believed international consulting will give him a better opportunity to work and travel.
When it comes to being involved on BYU campus, Allison Oberle has been there, done that. She graduated in 2015 from the global supply chain program. During her time at BYU, she worked on the women’s initiative of GSC, served as VP of Women’s Outreach, led as co-president of the Global Supply Chain Association her senior year, and worked in the Global Management Center. She also danced competitively on BYU’s international folk dancing team for three consecutive years, traveling for months at a time. She now works for Sun Products Cooperation in Salt Lake City as a customer supply chain specialist.
Kim Borup knows a good investment when she sees one.
Working as an attorney at one of the oldest firms in New York City, Chandler Tanner finally understood what the classic rock band Loverboy meant when they sang “Working for the Weekend.”
The roar of more than thirty thousand screaming fans had just been swallowed by an avalanche of noise from an F-22 Raptor and an F-15 fighter jet streaking overhead.
When Terisa Poulsen Gabrielsen finished her business management degree, the year was 1982 and the economy was bleak. Though she was determined to enter the business world, her best offer was a job teaching accounting at Salt Lake Community College. There, Gabrielsen discovered an unexpected love for teaching that kept her at the school for the next twenty-five years. Despite that love, she realized she had a job rather than a career. That realization became a turning point that would take her to the University of Utah, then to the streets of Philadelphia, and back to a BYU classroom.
In 1980 finance alum Ryan Tibbitts was one year away from graduating, but it wasn’t the textbooks he was hitting hard. Tibbitts was gearing up, along with the rest of the BYU football team, to take on Southern Methodist University—a showdown now immortalized in Tibbitts’s new book, Hail Mary: The Inside Story of BYU’s 1980 Miracle Bowl Comeback.
“Deciding to be a full-time mom over working full-time is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make,” says Marie Nielson Canaday. In fact, it’s a decision she still struggles with. While tending to two active boys keeps her very busy, Canaday is nurturing both her sons and her thriving love of all things business.
Jolene Day Weston’s two children can practically ski circles around her, even though they’re only three and a half. Her career path and journey to motherhood have taken a similar circuitous course.
Curtis Bedont thought he knew what it meant to be in the military. Though he spent his formative years on bases in foreign outposts, his fighter-pilot father never faced deployment.
Call it a cruel but fortunate twist of fate: Dan Handy’s companies tend to undergo extreme growth when it comes time for him to hit the books. As an undergrad and a grad student at the Marriott School, the current CEO of Bluehost.com guided two internet start-ups to success, sometimes smashing against current trends with a Ping-Pong paddle.
Fifty-six years and 1.3 million birthday parties may seem impossible, but it sums up John Huish’s career. He’s had a hand in facilitating cake-and-candle celebrations across five states and has provided jobs for more than one hundred thousand people.
It only took five seconds for Ryan Judkins’s boss to approve his beard plan. Surprised, Judkins, a sales representative for Callaway Golf and a normally clean-cut guy, asked, “You do realize I might have a beard that’s five, six, or seven inches long at one point?”
In the area of market research, Cathy Chamberlain is a one-woman political powerhouse. Her influence, as well as the results of her studies, has been spread across the country from Washington, DC, back to the West Coast, and overseas as well. Since graduating from BYU in 1973 with a degree in business education, she’s tallied up more than thirty years of experience in market research and is still going strong.
Cameron Moll knew he wanted to give something back to the customers who made his entrepreneurial venture a success, but he had no idea it would take him halfway around the world with an international celebrity.
Cameron Moll knew he wanted to give something back to the customers who made his entrepreneurial venture a success, but he had no idea it would take him halfway around the world with an international celebrity.
Matthew Bowman likes leading the pack. His salesmanship has landed him a prestigious award and created a career leading fast-growing sales and customer service companies.