The Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University recently recognized 10 first-year MBA candidates as Eccles Scholars, an award presented by the school’s Whitmore Global Management Center. Each recipient was awarded up to $9,000 of financial aid for schooling expenses, international projects and global career exploration.
“This award clearly distinguishes each student as a future leader in the global business community,” says Bruce Money, Whitmore Center director. “To be chosen as an Eccles Scholar signifies that you will represent BYU, the Marriott School and the Eccles name with distinction.”
The 2016 Eccles Scholars are Leandro Baer Barbosa from São Paulo; Christopher Barnes from Eugene, Ore.; Brad Call from Bountiful, Utah; Margaret Ebeling from Philadelphia; Angela Hui from Richmond Hill, Ontario; Rodrigo Ortigoza from Brampton, Ontario; Joshua Porter from Spokane, Wash.; D. Brandon Remington from Sammamish, Wash.; Daniel Wilde from Ventura, Calif.; and Kris Willenbrecht from Yorba Linda, Calif.
A committee of faculty members interviewed 55 applicants and selected the top 10 candidates who were chosen on the basis of academic performance and their trajectory toward a global business career.
“Global business is an important piece of the school’s mission,” Money says. “To elevate students with global potential to this prestigious award means that the Marriott School and its donors are serious about training leaders who will make a significant contribution to the global marketplace and their communities.”
The Eccles Scholars Award is funded by the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation. The foundation was created in 1960 to ensure that the Eccles’ philanthropic work would continue beyond their lifetimes. The foundation supports many projects and programs, particularly in education, at nearly every college and university campus throughout the state of Utah.
The Marriott School is located at Brigham Young University, the largest privately owned, church-sponsored university in the United States. The school has nationally recognized programs in accounting, business management, entrepreneurship, finance, information systems and public management. The school’s mission is to prepare men and women of faith, character and professional ability for positions of leadership throughout the world. Approximately 3,300 students are enrolled in the Marriott School’s graduate and undergraduate programs.
First-year MBA student and São Paulo native Leandro Baer Barbosa loves soccer, so to combine his passion for athletics with his passion for business, he is serving as the 2016 MBA Association director of athletics. Barbosa earned a degree in mechatronics engineering from the University of São Paulo, and has worked at Philips for five years as a commercial consultant, business developer and key account manager. In 2015 he received a Cardon International Scholarship award. “The Marriott School provides me with a high quality education that has really pushed me to higher levels,” he says. Barbosa and his wife, Camila, have been married for five years and have a three-year-old daughter named Anne. Next up for Barbosa? An internship at Dell.
If he’s not in the Tanner Building, he’s most likely roughhousing with his three sons or playing early-morning pick-up basketball with his fellow MBA classmates. Christopher Barnes, a first-year MBA student from Eugene, Ore., graduated from BYU in accounting in 2010, working after at Ernst & Young in Nashville as a senior associate and at Geffen Mesher in Portland as the audit manager of a local CPA firm. There he also led the firm’s Asia Pacific practice, providing auditory services to companies with operations in China as well as Chinese companies pursuing outbound transactions in the U.S. He currently serves as the MBA Association vice president of finance and will take a finance development internship at 3M this year. His decision to pursue a BYU MBA was fueled by his desire to acquire more global experience. “I came back to school to position myself for leadership opportunities within global organizations in the future, and I absolutely believe the Marriott School prepares its students to excel in that type of landscape.”
Brad Call is making magic happen — not only while teaching at the Wizard English School in Tianjin and Nanchang, China, but also domestically as well. Call, now a first-year MBA student from Bountiful, Utah, double majored in linguistics and international studies at the University of Utah in 2013 where he was also a five-year member of the marching band. He has worked as an executive assistant at the Ballard Group in Washington, D.C., and as a subject matter expert for the global support division of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. His Marriott School experience impacted him early on. “After just one semester, the BYU MBA program had already transformed the way I think. I came in as an outsider to the business community and have learned so much about what it takes to do business.” Call has a passion for new technologies and foreign languages and is married to Rachel Morrison; together they have one daughter, Lizzie.
Guten tag! Bonjour! Hola! First-year MBA Scholar Margaret Ebeling has a knack for languages. A native of Philadelphia, she graduated from BYU in 2011 with a degree in German literature, speaks French and has a goal to learn Spanish. Ebeling has put those lingual skills to use as a project manager at MultiLing, a company where she spent three years managing 13 teams across seven countries in completing more than 2,000 translation and patent filing projects. She also worked for three years as a German instructor at Karl G. Maeser Preparatory Academy where she founded the school’s German program and designed curriculum for four class levels. With her MBA emphasis in marketing, Ebeling is currently helping to develop a digital marketing strategy for Circles, an organization in Provo that aids people in overcoming generational poverty. This year Ebeling will take on two internships, one in brand management at Johnson & Johnson and the other in campaign management at Chatbooks.
Angela Hui entered BYU’s MBA program hailing from L’Oreal Hong Kong, where she worked for four years as an assistant management controller. Hui earned her undergraduate degree in business administration from the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario in 2011. Hui loves the community of BYU’s business programs, which includes her brother, Alex, who is an undergraduate studying marketing. “The program fosters an atmosphere where everyone is willing to help each other out and that provides many opportunities for me to learn from my peers and to serve others.” Hui is a first-year MBA student and will be the 2016-17 president of the MBA Marketing Association. She is from Richmond Hill, Ontario, and enjoys traveling, learning about new cultures, hiking, baking, and playing the piano and flute.
Canada, Venezuela, Colombia and the Philippines — first-year MBA Scholar Rodrigo Ortigoza has influences from them all. While he calls Brampton, Ontario, home, his father from Venezuela, his mother from Colombia, and his wife from the Philippines all help enrich his cultural experience and knowledge. Ortigoza received a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering in 2010 from Ryerson University, where he was awarded a University Gold Medal and the Canadian Aeronautics and Space Institute Annual Student Award. He has also worked at Bombardier Aerospace, where he served as a performance intern and later an engineering specialist. He currently acts as the president of the BYU MBA Supply Chain and Operations Association and will begin an internship at Amazon as a pathways operations manager intern this year. Of his MBA experience, he says, “Every day I am intellectually stretched, socially enriched and spiritually uplifted like never before. I will be forever grateful for this world-class preparatory experience.”
Scholar Joshua Porter proves that science and business really do work together. Porter, a 2005 BYU mechanical engineering grad from Spokane, Wash., most recently worked at FLSmidth India as an engineering manager, overseeing up to 70 international engineers and designers. He is working toward an MBA with a global supply chain emphasis and was interested in the Marriott School because of its both academic and spiritual nature. “What draws me to the BYU MBA program is the high-quality learning opportunity looked at through the lens of spirituality. Not only do we learn how to be successful but we also learn how we should live. This dual focus allows us to leave the Marriott School ready to be a light to those around us.” Porter enjoys playing board games and camping with his family which includes his wife, Rebecca, and their five girls: Halee, Megan, Brittany, Claire and Elise.
Brandon Remington is rich in experience. The first-year MBA student from Sammamish, Wash., is working towards a combined JD/MBA degree, a supplement to his undergraduate degree in history which he received from BYU in 2007. Remington’s service includes time as a company commander and Afghan police adviser in the U.S. Marine Corps as well as in numerous campus positions, including associate editor of the BYU Law Review, founder of Marriott School Veterans and director of legal affairs for Cougar Capital. Remington is married with four children and after graduation plans to take on the role as an attorney in the Mergers & Acquisitions Group of Sidley Austin LLP, a company he worked with during the summer of 2015, and as a clerk at the Delaware Court of Chancery.
Daniel Wilde is a first-year MBA student from Ventura, Calif., and is also currently serving as vice chairman of the Foundation for the Homeward Bound. He received his undergraduate accounting degree from BYU in 2010, a masters of accounting from the College of William & Mary in 2011 and is a licensed CPA. Before returning to BYU for his MBA degree, Wilde worked at Ernst & Young as an assurance associate and a consulting CFO for Preferred CFO. After graduation in 2017 Wilde will continue as a student, this time working towards his PhD in business strategy. He and his wife, Janessa, have a girl, Jadelyn, and are expecting a baby boy in May.
It’s a busy and exciting year for first-year MBA student Kris Willenbrecht. Not only are he and his wife, Catherine, expecting a new baby in July but also Willenbrecht will soon be taking on another important role as a graduate finance intern at Amazon. One-of-a-kind career experiences, Willenbrecht says, have been possible for him because of his Marriott School experience. “No other top MBA program was able to offer the return on investment that BYU can offer and I am so glad I made the decision to attend.” Before beginning the MBA program, Willenbrecht earned his undergraduate degree in management from BYU in 2011, then worked for four years at Deloitte Advisory as a senior associate. Willenbrecht, a native of Yorba Linda, Calif., enjoys surfing, fishing, reading and keeping up with current events, markets and politics.
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Writer: Kasee Bailey