The MBArtist files

In the spring of 2017, I was a first-year MBA student at the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business, and I posted something to my website every single week under the banner "MBArtist." Nineteen posts, February to June. I found them again this week, still sitting on my old site like a time capsule nobody remembered burying, and decided they deserved one more outing.

Most of them were class projects I couldn't stop myself from overdesigning. For Marketing Management, my team researched Flying Dog Brewery and I turned our findings into two sample commercials, then asked readers to vote for a favorite. Our Data Mining final was titled "Death Is Its Own Reward," and I noted at the time that the PowerPoint could be blamed entirely on me. Strategic IT got "Will the real Marriott please stand up?" and Product Development got a wireframe video for an app called GroTrack. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, every student pitched an idea to recruit a team, and four stellar women joined mine to build an app called Take Me Out.

Then there was the job I took more seriously than any class. A few months earlier, MPOWER Financing had heard my laugh at a startup career fair and offered me a marketing internship (the long version is in A decade in one post). The blog caught the beginning in real time: my first pass at an introduction video for the company, my first company blog post (five tips for mastering non-verbal communication), and an animated onboarding video timed to my own voiceover that saved the customer care team about 10 hours a week. I captioned that one "Try to enjoy my horrible voice." When it was time to launch MPOWER's Instagram, I knew I needed an edge, so out came a chalkboard, and I drew the first twelve posts by hand. By April I was a Hisaoka Fellow, which meant the Dingman Center helped pay for me to keep at it all summer.

Campus life got its share too. I ran for MBA Association Vice President of Marketing and Communications on a platform of experience, transparency, and creativity, and won. As a first-year board member of the Professional Communications Club, I asked the president about our TED-style talk night and learned nothing was planned and they were thinking of canceling it, so I offered to run it. We called it Timeless: seven classmates giving seven talks on the theme of time, with dinner, drinks, and background music I described as happy white noise.

One early Sunday morning, I walked out of Van Munching Hall with a camera and photographed a campus I'd never seen so empty. That same spring I started painting again after a decade-long break. In hindsight, those two posts explain a lot about the skies on this site.

The year ended at the MBA banquet with the First-Year Rising Star Award, nominated by my classmates. The citation mentioned presentation skills, marketing, and "contagious laughter." That laugh has been doing a lot of heavy lifting for me.

Nine years later, I still can't make a plain slide, and I still think a chalkboard is a perfectly reasonable marketing strategy.