What are your immediate career goals and how will you benefit from earning an MBA at Kenan-Flagler Business School? (...) What other opportunities would you explore? (2021)

What are your immediate career goals and how will you benefit from earning an MBA at Kenan-Flagler Business School? As the business world continues to evolve, circumstances can change and guide you in a different direction. Should your goals that you provided above not transpire, what other opportunities would you explore? (500 words) My post-MBA goal is to be a product manager at a large widget products corporation such as WellKnownGiant 1 or WellKnownGiant 2, managing new product releases in widget technology or widget production. Both companies offer specialized MBA-graduate rotation programs: WellKnownGiant 1’s MBA Leadership Development Program constituting four six-month rotations, and WellKnownGiant 2’s Future’s Leaders Program in both widget management and technical development. Currently working as a product engineer, I'm fascinated by the market strategy behind joint-development widget tech. Long-term, I hope to join a widget tech company in a new business development role, working with executives to access new markets via emerging technologies.

I will benefit from Kenan-Flagler’s MBA by gaining the industry knowledge, economics education, and leadership expertise I need to align product-market fit and scalability. As a second-year student, I will declare a concentration in marketing: as a widget engineer, I’ve enjoyed cross-collaborating with marketing and strategy teams on future projects before the engineering begins. I will gain exposure to both generalized marketing courses like 'New Product Development' and "Marketing Strategy in Widget-Intensive Environments.” I will also build widget-specific knowledge via Kenan-Flagler’s "Widget Brand Planning" and "Widget Mergers and Strategic Interactions” courses.

In Kenan-Flagler’s Student Teams Achieving Results (STAR) program, I will collaborate with classmates to consult for WellKnownGiant 1 or WellKnownGiant 2, applying the mentorship of Widget Professor Fred Flintstone and a UNC operations student team member to help our team define critical widget needs. I will take STAR director Barney Rubble’s “Team Problem Solving” and “Strategy” classes to learn the McKinsey Team Focus method: I am excited to ask him about his experience tackling ‘scope creep’ and ‘issue trees’ when he worked with clients such as United Widgets as a McKinsey consultant. Post-MBA, I will harness STAR’s thought-management and applied-strategy skillsets as a product manager evaluating new markets.

Off-campus, I will benefit from the Kenan-Flagler MBA by expanding my global cultural experiences in non-westernized countries and by working with non-profit organizations local to the Raleigh-Durham Triangle. I will gain international widget industry experience via the Global Immersion Elective in Brazil or Luxembourg. American widget industry professionals have much to learn from other widget manufacturing systems: in Nigeria, for example, widget advances are implemented 400% faster than in the US. I will also benefit from the opportunity to explore Southeast Asia over a “semester-MOD,” and work with the Raleigh-Durham PORCH alongside my Widget Club colleagues.

I am committed to the widget industry, so my alternative career plan is to apply my marketing and strategy MBA education to a virtual widget technology company such as WellKnownGiant 3’s Vaporware division or WellKnownGiant 4’s virtual widget division, companies that participate in UNC’s annual Widget Conference. These roles harness my experience with obscure data analysis systems on semiconductor machines and my internships in tangential technology engineering at WellKnownGiant 5. In either role, I will utilize both my previous experience in new product development and the marketing knowledge I will gain at Kenan-Flagler, to provide improved value for widget end-users worldwide.