Before even stepping foot on BYU campus, global supply chain management (GSCM) senior Kennedy McMullin knew she was interested in business. What she didn’t know was the complex—and sometimes comical—situations she would find herself working in.
As a high school student in Durham, North Carolina, McMullin found ways to not only streamline operations and improve processes during her shifts as a manager for the local Crumbl but also apply business principles in her home life.
“I would make PowerPoints for my parents—whether it was wanting to get a phone earlier or to stay out later with my friends. I was always negotiating with them,” McMullin recalls. “That's a big part in supply chain: You are connecting and negotiating with a lot of organizations to make one value stream that flows smoothly.”
Taking business classes at the BYU Marriott School of Business shifted McMullin’s interest from general business to supply chain. “I had been doing supply chain my whole life, and I didn’t even know it,” McMullin says. With the assistance of a GSCM program student guide, she strengthened her application to the program and was accepted.
“One thing I love about supply chain is you have the most extraordinary problems. I never really considered myself a creative person, but there are ways in supply chain where I can solve problems creatively—think outside the box about how to make a process better,” McMullin explains. “You end up doing the craziest things.”
In one of her classes in the junior core, she and her team had to route a logistics network for a company and figure out how to move 22,000 tons of oranges. “There are so many things in supply chain you would never think you would need to worry about,” McMullin says, “like pirates disrupting maritime logistics, negotiating high stakes contracts, and just the volume of the product you deal with.”
McMullin put those problem-solving skills to the test during an internship at Walmart in the summer after her junior year. "It's definitely not just looking at a spreadsheet; I got into all kinds of fun situations,” McMullin says.
One day at the Walmart office, she saw a man struggling with his visitor’s pass and two suitcases—and as she helped him with his bags, she noticed how heavy they were. During their conversation, she found out that the man was a lab-grown diamond supplier. “The suitcase was full of diamonds, and he was just letting me tote it along,” McMullin laughs.
Now as a senior at BYU Marriott, McMullin works as a GSCM program guide and a teaching assistant for GSCM 403: Purchasing/Supply Management and GSCM 412: Operations Analytics. Through these jobs, she is able to work with every GSCM student coming into the program, and she says she can’t imagine anything more fulfilling.
“I'm very grateful for everyone who's helped me, and I'm just trying to do what I can to help all the people who will come after me,” she says. “I'm a big believer that once you climb a mountain, the best thing you can do is turn around and help other people get up.”
McMullin accepted a full-time position at Walmart in Arkansas following her graduation this April, and she says she looks forward to a future of solving logistical puzzles and worrying about pirates.
