As he struggled to find consulting internships, BYU Marriott School of Business strategy student Charlie Rhodes leveraged his network to find and embrace new opportunities. That approach led Rhodes to London, standing and talking with members of the UK House of Lords about issues surrounding religious freedom in Nigeria.
Rhodes, from Kaysville, Utah, traveled to London with support from the Whitmore Global Business Center for a conference focused on promoting religious freedom. The opportunity came after interning with the FoRB Foundation, a UK-based group partnered with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for International Freedom of Religion and Belief.
Interning in an advisory role allowed Rhodes to assist in a variety of projects and problems including one project that involved assisting kidnapping-victim camps in Nigeria. As a remote intern, Rhodes acted as a liaison between the FoRB Foundation and the BYU engineering department, which partnered with the foundation to provide solar power to the Nigerian camps.
“The experience showed me that anyone can really make a difference if they’re willing to just put their foot forward,” Rhodes says. Serving a mission in Ghana for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is what originally prompted Rhodes’s interest in solving problems. “It was my mission that opened my mind to the responsibility to use whatever I do in life to make the world a better place,” Rhodes says, adding that he learned about the importance of seeing beyond statistics and really connecting with the people served.
After transferring from Utah State University to BYU after his mission, Rhodes gravitated to the strategy program and the prospect of a career in consulting. “I wanted to solve meaningful problems, but I also wanted to get a variety of experience in working on problems in all sorts of industries and domains.” But having set his sights on consulting, Rhodes worried he wasn’t getting any traction in the consulting field.
His wife saw his struggle and encouraged him to consider a new path. “She told me, ‘If you want to go and have an impactful career, you have to be willing to do something different,’” Rhodes recalls.
For Rhodes, “something different” looked like breaking his habit of maxing out his allowable semester course credit load to devote more time to gaining experience outside the classroom.
Rhodes began tapping into his growing network. His mission president connected him to an internship consulting about agriculture projects for the Church, a neighbor helped him connect with the FoRB Foundation, and his professors helped him feel more capable to pursue opportunities. “As I reached out, my professors gave me the encouragement to know that I could do difficult work.”
As Rhodes’s confidence grew, he says he also learned that speaking up allowed him to contribute to his teams. In his internship with the FoRB Foundation, Rhodes spoke to his experiences in West Africa and added his insights as a young adult. “I'm sure my impact really was small in the grand scheme of things. But I do think speaking up gave me the opportunities to at least try.”
Rhodes’s decision to try a different approach led to another opportunity: his upcoming internship with McKinsey & Company. “The blessings that have come to fruition over these last six months are the result of years of just trying my best to say yes to every single opportunity that I could,” he says.
Moving forward, Rhodes hopes to earn both a JD and MBA and eventually pursue a career in politics after gaining experience in business. “Whether it’s in business or government,” he says, “my goal is to solve problems that are really going to help people.”