Student Profile: Challenging Yourself

Jason Hill '11
Pre-SOM: Bartle Bogle Hegarty
President, Yale SOM Student Government
Summer Internship: Booz & Company

While I'm at SOM, I plan to take the most challenging electives that I can — courses that are as much out of my comfort zone as possible. I want to use my time here to take courses that are completely unrelated to anything I've done before and are really going to push me.

It is human tendency to do things that you're good at because they're just easier and you feel good about yourself when you get them done faster and you don't really struggle. But it's so much more important, especially when you're in a situation like business school, to do the things that you are not good at and to try to push yourself. And even though it's going to be challenging, that's how you're going to build your skills. It's one of the reasons I wanted to go back to school.

What brought me to business school in the first place was realizing that the advertising industry was going through fundamental changes. I realized that if I decided to come back to the industry, having an MBA would give me a unique and different take on the business.

I was in the advertising industry for six years with no formal training. I learned a ton on the job, but I felt that there were still big pieces that were missing — the hard skills. And if I was going to have a career in advertising or marketing or even start my own agency down the road, I needed to learn accounting, corporate finance, and competitive strategy so that I could really add value. I'm excited to try consulting for the summer for a different take on a client service business, and to compare it to what I was doing before school.

I applied to Yale SOM because it was the one place I visited where I thought the reality bore out what all of the school’s materials said about the community and about the passion of the students. I felt a sense of ownership and responsibility among the students I met — everyone cares immensely about leaving SOM better than they found it and so I knew there would be opportunities for me to get involved and make a difference.

Indeed, I got involved in student government early on because I like mobilizing people and working with a lot of different groups. I'm excited to be in a position to welcome the incoming class and help represent my own class. Hopefully a year from now I can look back and say that we really enacted a lot of positive change for the school.

Interviewed on April 1, 2010.