Kjerstin Roberts was teaching high school English in Jacksonville, Florida, when she decided to get her MBA. While her dad had been praising the benefits of the graduate degree for years, Roberts didn’t realize that an MBA would also introduce her to a career path that she hadn’t anticipated: getting a PhD and becoming a college professor.
Roberts always knew she wanted to study business, so she earned a bachelor’s degree in experience design and management from the BYU Marriott School of Business. Afterward, instead of taking a traditional business job, Roberts decided to follow her passion for teaching and join Teach for America, a nonprofit that trains young professionals to teach and assigns them to low-income schools all over the country. The program seemed like a good fit, and she felt God confirm her decision.
However, the experience proved unexpectedly challenging. Roberts was surrounded by supportive mentors, but the chaotic environment of the school took a severe toll on her mental health. After witnessing constant gang violence, dealing with SWAT teams, and finally having to talk a student down from his desire to shoot another student, she knew she needed a change—and that’s when she decided to act on her dad’s advice.
“My dad said everybody should get an MBA. It makes you see the world in a totally different way,” Roberts explains. As she began investigating different options for her MBA, she felt an unexplainable prompting to return to BYU Marriott; though it was different than the path she had in mind, Roberts decided to heed the feeling.
Roberts began the BYU Marriott MBA program in 2023, and she’s confident that it is exactly where she needs to be. “The program is competitive because BYU Marriott is a top business school, but it’s not competitive interpersonally,” she says, describing how students support each other even as they compete for the same job opportunities. “There are just really awesome people in the program.”
A particularly impactful experience that Roberts cherishes is helping host the MBA program’s Women in Business Conference. As part of the inaugural event in March 2024, Roberts aided in finding speakers, planning event logistics, and ensuring that the event centered on BYU Marriott values. “We saw so many women connect,” she remembers. She notes that the event inspired more efforts to recruit women to the MBA program—efforts that she was tapped to lead, including running the November 2024 Women in Business conference (which quadrupled in attendance) and hosting recruiting dinners, information sessions, and events for female upperclassmen considering an MBA.
“Helping run women’s recruiting efforts and putting on the Women in Business Conference has really helped me see what an amazing network of supportive, amazing women we have here at BYU Marriott,” Roberts details. The supportive culture she found in the MBA program wiped away any lingering hesitancies she had as an undergraduate about belonging in the business world as a woman.
In fact, Roberts attributes the mentorship she has received at BYU Marriott with being an important factor in her decision to pursue a PhD in organizational behavior. Her interest in a PhD was first piqued when, in one of her classes, MBA Director Dan Snow offered to talk to anyone considering a PhD. He subsequently connected her with several female professors, and she enjoyed learning about their unique teaching experiences, particularly as she conducted research with Taeya Howell, associate professor of management, and McKenzie Rees, assistant professor of organizational behavior and human resources. Roberts continued to receive support from many faculty members as she took advantage of the university’s pre-PhD resources, attended the Academy of Management conference in Chicago, and worked through applications.
Roberts, now set to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill after she graduates this semester, plans to use her PhD to combine her love of business and teaching to work as a college professor. “If I am even half as helpful to my students as my mentors have been to me, I’ll consider myself immensely successful as a professor,” she says.
Roberts believes that following promptings leads individuals to where they need to be—looking back, she now has a clearer understanding of how her time teaching in Florida was important and why she was prompted to return to BYU Marriott. “I’m a firm believer that Heavenly Father has a plan for each person,” Roberts reflects. “He’s going to prepare you for whatever the plan is, even if you don’t realize that’s what’s happening.”
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Written by Katie Brimhall
