Bachelor in Marketing - University of Idaho - (Winner)
Editors Note: This student story essay was selected as 2nd place winner from BrainTrack's Business Scholarship for Spring, 2011. At the time of submittal this winner, Sarah Sakai, was studying for a Bachelor in Marketing at University of Idaho.
Wishes Had Known | Advice on Career | Study TipsWhat do you wish you had known about selecting and entering your business school that would be helpful to others going into business?
When I started applying to business schools, there are a few things I wish I had known about business, both to help the selection process, and also the beginning of the attendance process.
1.You learn it all. And that’s a good thing.
Apparently when you declare your specific business major, it really has no effect on what you learn until about the middle of your junior year. If I had known that going into college, I think there would have been a lot less pressure to choose a major and choose it quick.
As it was, I didn’t official declare my major till halfway through my junior year and it didn’t cripple my college track at all. In the beginning, everyone learns everything. Whether you like it or not, you will all take the basic economics and accounting classes. And at University of Idaho, even your junior year is spent learning the fundamentals of management, finance, accounting, economics, operations, information systems, human resources, and marketing.
Looking back, I wish I had known that not only would I have to learn everything, but that it would be well worth it.
Business is about being well-rounded, well-informed, and driven. If you can market a product like no other, but you don’t know or care about the cost of financing the product, you aren’t going to be successful for long. So take full advantage of having to learn it all. And if you don’t know what you want to do, take this opportunity to see what you like and what you don’t. And don’t let the pressure to choose a major get to your head. Unless it’s the beginning of your senior year and you still don’t know…then you might want to make a decision.
2.It’s not always about what you know. It’s oftentimes about who you know.
I thought when I got to college I would just learn everything that I needed to know, get good grades, graduate, and land my dream job. Not likely. Unfortunately, or fortunately (depending on your disposition), it’s not necessarily all about what you learn in college, but about the network you build while there.
I wish I had known this going in, so that I could have started my networking early. I made it through my freshman and sophomore year with very little connection to anything outside of college, and my connections within college were short-term and based on what movie was showing Friday night. Not until my junior year did I actually start expanding my network and it is much harder scrambling to try and create a network than it is to gradually build it over the course of your college career.
My advice, start now. I know graduation seems like eternity away, but college will go fast, and when the end comes, you want to know enough people to make your transition into the real world as painless as possible.
3.Just because you are a business major doesn’t mean you are stuck there.
The more I thought about business in high school, the more nervous I became. I wanted the freedom I knew it provided, but I also wanted to enjoy my life…and I wasn’t sure that I would be able to do that with business. I would get visions of sitting in a dark office, squinting at numbers on a computer screen, alone and depressed. What I have found is that business is just the foundation for so much more, and within business, there are different areas for different kinds of people. Accounting, marketing, finance, human resources, economics, operations, and information systems—all are different areas that require different skills and different personalities. That in itself was freeing to discover.
But I also found that just because you are in business does not mean that you will necessarily be doing strictly business your whole life. What happens if you like to paint? Or in my case, like to write? Do you just throw away your passions in order to get a practical business major? Well, that’s the beauty of business. Because it is a foundation, you can build anything on top of it. I have been able to take my business knowledge and apply it to my work for our school newspaper. If you like to paint, pursue that, and then with your business knowledge start a business selling your paintings.
Business really is freeing because it provides the foundation to do really anything you want. Maybe that is strictly business and maybe it is the practical side of an artistic dream, but whatever your passion in life is, you should know that business will help with the practical side of it, so the visionary part of you is free to dream big and change the world.
Other than school, what would you advise people entering the business field to consider or prepare for?
My advice for people entering the business field is to prepare for life.
Broad and vague, I know, but hear me out. We are given a life to live and, on average, it lasts for about eighty-five years. Considering how fast college is going by, eighty-five years really isn’t that long. My advice is to take a moment before the craziness of college begins and think about what you want those eighty-five years to be about.
The reason I think this is so important is because of two things. First, college is where you get to decide what kind of person you are going to be and what your life is going to be about. Really, what you decide about yourself in college can affect the trajectory of the next forty to fifty years of your life. Secondly, business is a field that impacts so much more than just the firm itself. The decisions that businesses make affect the economy, the environment, politics, communities, societies, standards of living, sometimes even people’s health and safety. That is a lot of responsibility on the part of the people running that business. Are you up to it?
I said it earlier, but one of the most important things to do in college is to keep perspective. Decisions you make have lasting consequences, whether you can see them or not. You need to prepare yourself for a world where conviction and thinking of others is inconvenient and unpopular. You need to understand that the business world is mostly about creating value and making money. And you need to understand what lasts and what doesn’t. People last. Money doesn’t always. Relationships can affect the rest of your life. The grade you got in accounting probably won’t. Keep perspective on what is important to you and what should be secondary. Because if you can figure it out and live it out in college, then you are already way ahead of some people in the professional world.
You have eighty-five years to make your mark and to focus on what you think is most important, and college is where you get to decide and then act on those decisions. Don’t go into that blind. You spent the last twelve years prepping for college academia. At least take some time to prep for the decisions that will impact the rest of your life.
What study tips would you recommend to other business students?
Chances are you’ve been hearing this since you were in first grade…and been ignoring it just as long. I’ll be the first to admit that in high school cramming was my studying style and I was good at it.
The energy drinks, the pump-up music, the all-nighters, the life-saving short term memory—all are iconic of the typical college day-before-the-test cramming session. And more often than not, the test comes back, you’ve received your good grade, and everything you just jammed into your brain slips out the back. You have retained very little, if anything at all.
And in high school, that might have been okay. Even in some of the freshman level classes you’ll take, that might be acceptable, because, really, much of the information you can look up if you really want to know it, or look back on notes.
Not so in business.
As soon as you start taking classes that actually teach you business, you need to man up and pay attention. Learn the material. Because if you don’t, it does matter. Not only does the information build on itself, but it actually effects how you will perform after you graduate.
Things that I crammed for in my entry level classes have come back to haunt me in every class since. I am part of a club that puts on receptions for faculty and professionals and at those mixers, I hear them casually talking about the very things I am learning about in class.
The information that you are learning in your business classes is not pointless, one-time information. You will actually use it. And so if you want to be successful, not just by the standards of your college GPA, then you need to actually learn the material and cramming just doesn’t cut it.
2. Study with Others (the more brains the better)
Flying solo might be more convenient, but it is dangerous and much less effective.
Someone once told me that you retain about 15% of what you read, 30% of what you hear, and 55% of what you teach. I don’t know the statistical evidence behind those numbers so don’t take that as gospel, but there is a point. Studying by yourself is helpful and should be the starting point. But studying with someone else, teaching them what they don’t understand, letting them teach you what you don’t understand, and working through what you both don’t understand, is often the most effective way to study.
I have found that I do much better on tests when I study with other people. If you haven’t noticed yet, everyone is different, everyone remembers different things, and everyone understands different things better. It’s like taking a test with four brains instead of just one. And since teachers still don’t allow that, studying with four different brains is the next best thing.
And as long you don’t choose a really annoying study group, you might also make some friends.
3. Keep Perspective (grades aren’t everything)
Before you kick the textbook to the curb and start partying, hear me out. I did not say that grades are not important; I said they are not everything. There are those whose mantra is “C’s get degrees” and there are those whose life ends with a B. If anything goes, then you probably don’t care enough to learn and being successful in business is going to be tough. On the other hand, if a 4.0 is your life’s mission, you probably care so much about grades that actually learning can get thrown under the bus and you’re crippled by anything but perfection.
Find the happy medium.
You need to realize that you should put your whole heart into everything. Don’t be a slacker. You might be able to slip through college like that, but it won’t fly in the business world. But you also need to realize that businesses are looking for real people, not 4.0 robots. Enjoy your time in college. Get involved in activities and clubs. Make friends and make memories. In interviews, I get asked the same amount of questions about my extracurricular activities as I do about what courses I am taking in school and what business experience I have.
Businesses care what grades you get because it is often an indication of your work ethic. But ten years down the road, your ability to interact with and manage people will probably matter more than what grade you received in economics 201.
So understand, that having good adventure stories is no substitute for hard work, but perfection is unrealistic, and in the end, doesn’t matter nearly as much as you might expect.