MBA students walked out of the Marketing Futures Summit, hosted by the BYU Marriott School of Business, with a PVC pipe and a branded hoodie in hand. Aside from providing participants with some BYU Marriott swag, the event offered students the opportunity to both network with recent MBA alumni and develop professional skills.
“This event was designed to be different,” says Trevor Monney, a second-year MBA student and president of the MBA Marketing Association (MBAMA). “Many of us wanted to understand what life looks like right after the program.”
For the event, the MBAMA brought in nine MBA alumni who graduated in the last five years and currently work in marketing roles. The alumni participated in two panel discussions: one examining the current industry of marketing and another on building a brand that people love. But, Monney says, the biggest value of the event came from the alumni-run student workshops.
“We gave the alumni discretion over the content; our only ask was that we wanted it to be interactive, and we wanted students to walk away with skills and exposure they couldn’t get in the classroom,” Monney says. The workshops led to a variety of hands-on experiences for participants.
The take-home PVC pipe came from Chad Carr, senior manager of product marketing at Adobe, who used it as a representation of the product-value-customer framework he taught during his workshop. Savanna Empey Mason and Val Fulton, marketplace managers at Pattern, walked participants through the process of finding and resolving a business problem using anonymized data from a company they consulted with. Brooke Harper-Rios, founder of Brooke Marie interior design, taught students a model to help them use their thought processes to improve their outcomes.
Students also participated in workshops from Michael Connors, lead product manager for AT&T; Camila Costa, senior project manager at Warner Bros. Discovery; Cedric Huntington, brand manager of innovation for Chips Ahoy! at Mondelēz; Blaine Rodriguez, senior brand manager of Owala for Trove Brands; and Kaitlin Taft-Phillips, Wi-Fi CX product leader at Delta Air Lines.
The variety of industries represented also gave students the chance to see opportunities they might not have previously considered, Monney explains. “We were trying to broaden students’ horizons and get their hands dirty with what marketing looks like in the real world.”
One example of a new horizon came to students during Costa’s workshop, where she talked about bringing together teams as a project manager to help Warner Brothers’ Harry Potter: 25 Years of Magic campaign come to life. During the workshop, some of the students shared that because of Costa’s presentation, project management is now a path they’re interested in pursuing.
And Monney says that finding new career options was just one indication of the event’s success: “Watching participants network with alumni between sessions and hearing them talk about real recruiting progress made it clear to me that the event accomplished its purpose.”