Student Profile: Marketing Tools

Tracy Shepard '12
Pre-SOM Position: Sierra Club
Summer Internship: Unilever
Incoming Co-leader, Marketing Club

After I started at SOM, I got excited about marketing, and specifically CPG. The Marketing Club was indispensible in my job search. We hadn't taken any marketing classes at the point at which we had to start writing cover letters, but the club had a couple of sessions on the lingo, and on how to write a great cover letter, how to emphasize the marketing-centric stuff in your résumé. And then mock interviews, and informational interview ideas. It was invaluable.

The CDO is great, too. My relationship manager had actually just come from Unilever to Yale, so she had tons of contacts. When I decided that Unilever was my top choice, she was really helpful setting up meetings and informational interviews. Informational interviews are your first chance to make a good impression—you need to ask insightful questions. And so it was really helpful to have someone from the industry who I could ask, "What are the trends?"

I love being on the Yale campus. I go to plays at the Yale Repertory Theatre with my fiancé. I've been to some lectures and film screenings at the Yale Humanities Center. There are incredible speakers coming through campus all the time. I saw T. Boone Pickens last week, and I sat in on a class that Stanley McChrystal is teaching. Next year I plan to take at least one class at the Law School.

I never expected to become close to people from so many disparate backgrounds, and people going into fields that didn't interest me at first, but they're all passionate about it, so it's infectious. I found myself interested in virtually every area of study here. I didn't expect to like Investor, but it's probably my favorite class—I'm going to be the TA next year. After the Customer course, I definitely felt prepared for my brand management interviews in terms of having the mindset and the tools to evaluate a marketing problem. And right now I'm taking the Integrated Leadership Perspective, which brings it all together. It's kind of shocking how far we've come and all these tools we have in our belts. For one class, we'll put a competitive strategy lens on, and then we'll run the financials, like we did in Sourcing and Managing Funds. And then we'll think about it from the customer perspective. We really get a holistic understanding. And now I'm going to go out in the business world and people are going to come to me with questions, and I'll have the tools to find the answers. That's pretty cool.

Interviewed on March 31, 2011.