Arriving in Milan—one of the fashion capitals of the world—was a dream come true for fashion enthusiast and strategy student Jordan Faust. “Even before I got into the strategy program, I knew I wanted to be on the study abroad in Italy,” she says. Faust says she would love for fashion to one day be part of her career, but for now she’s focused on learning from the people and opportunities placed in her path.
Faust, from Holladay, Utah, thought that she had to be accepted into a BYU Marriott program before going on the study abroad—a misconception that she says motivated her to stay on top of her program application and even complete the junior core before getting to Europe. “It was just all leading up to this dream,” Faust says. “Then I was in Milan and it was amazing. But coming home, I asked myself, ‘What am I doing? What are my goals?’”
For Faust, this time of soul-searching led her to the product management track within the strategy program. “I’m a big planner. I love organizing, but I think it’s important to leave gaps for God to be able to work in your life, too.”
Faust explains, “sometimes it’s better to not have a vision for your future and just take things that are coming up one thing at a time.” She accepted a product management internship that didn’t quite fit her goals, she says, but during her internship, she met people who would help open doors for her to find another job.
She also credits the support of others for helping her find and secure her internship; one friend from her study abroad even practiced interview questions with her. “It’s in those crunch times that I’ve seen people just drop everything and serve me like that,” Faust says. Now Faust is a product management intern at Leland, where her experiences have bolstered the optimism and drive she feels about her future.
She says her experiences at BYU Marriott have helped her see that networking can have a Christ-centered foundation and be rooted in charity and genuine interest in others. “Networking is just this selfless giving of wanting to uplift each other,” she explains. “I know for a fact that I would not be where I am now if it weren’t for the people in my cohort, or the friends I met on the study abroad.”
