My roommate Amanda* is going to graduate
in May 2014 with a BBA in Finance with a minor in Marketing. She is grateful to
have a background in finance, but is looking forward to starting a career in
the marketing field. Some may say it was impractical for her to get her degree
in finance when she ended up in marketing, but many factors went into her
graduating with this specific degree plan. This blog is a walk through her journey
to successfully choose a major at the University of Texas in the McCombs School
of Business, as well as a visual representation of her “journey map” from her
senior year of high school until now, her senior year of college. Journey maps
can be useful in discovering and understanding the customer experience and journey
while in contact with a brand or product. A good journey map can highlight how
the customer views, values, and uses a good or service by seeing their
interactions with the brand. Here we have a specific example of how one girl
made a decision about college majors.
Before coming into college, Amanda’s parents
had raised her to value education. Her parents were both well educated, with
her dad earning his MBA and being a successful business man and role model. As Amanda
did not know exactly what she wanted to do, her parents suggested business as
it gave her a wide range of career options and had the potential to provide her
with a wider choice of jobs with a good starting salary upon graduation. Her mom
suggested that Amanda apply for the Business Honors Program, and she was
accepted and immediately decided to commit to studying at Texas. She did not
know where specifically in business she wanted to end up, but she was also
considering the idea of a Spanish minor as she loved her Spanish classes in
high school.
In her first 2 semesters, she became
overwhelmed by the fervor of the business school and the competition in the
consulting sector of finance. She quickly dropped the idea of focusing on
Spanish as it did not fit into her degree plan, but felt drawn to the “glamor”
of big banking and consulting by her peers, older mentor figures, and
influential professors. She trusted their judgment and wanted to make them
proud of her. Amanda has always been good with numbers, but more importantly,
she has always been very competitive. In high school she was very involved with
the school’s swim team and won many awards with her team. The competition she
saw within the finance students intrigued her. In addition, the marketing department
caught her eye due to her desire to understand people and their decision-making
processes. During the second semester in her BA 324 class she realized that
business communication appealed to her from a career viewpoint and realized
marketing could combine her love of numbers and also qualitative data. She was
torn between these two majors as she drew closer to the time where she would be
able to declare a major.
During the summer after her freshman
year, Amanda worked as a marketing intern with a real estate firm in Dallas and
truly hated working there. This poor experience made her lean towards finance
as a potential major. Her sophomore year she decided to declare a major in Finance which
was reinforced by several different influential mediums. Many of her older
peers conveyed to her that it was easier to recruit for finance and get a good
internship and job. In addition, Amanda studied abroad with the BHP finance
department in Prague and loved the classes and the professors. Amanda decided
that she was going to minor in marketing because she still enjoyed the classes and
felt as though it was a good skill to have in addition to just finance.
Over the course of the first semester of
her junior year, Amanda’s decision to major in Finance didn’t exactly change,
but her attitude towards finance did. She took more marketing classes and loved
them. In addition, she gave up on consulting recruiting because of the
overwhelming amounts of unnecessary pressure she felt like surrounded it and
also didn’t feel very passionate about a career in consulting. Instead, she learned
about great opportunities in marketing where she could combine her analytical financial
skills with her love of understanding consumers better as a marketing analyst. She
got an amazing internship as a marketing analyst for a giant consumer goods
company and combined her consumer decision analysis with bid data analytics. This
definitely confirmed her choice to minor in marketing.
Amanda loved her experience in her most
recent marketing internship, but she has no regrets or ever had much desire to
change her major from finance to marketing. She has the experience and natural
instinct for marketing, but with a finance major she will so flexible in any
job she could be put into because of her financial knowledge as well. Along the
road after many bumps, nudges, and self-motivated steps, Amanda has arrived at her
senior year pursuing a finance degree with 100% confidence that it is what she
wants to graduate with, ready to explore where the knowledge she has
learned will take her. Below is a visual representation of the journey that
Amanda went through to end up where she is today.
*Names have been changed
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