Experience Matters: Jennifer Dodd, ’10 MBA

“The Experiential Learning program has greatly impacted my ability to add value to a loosely-defined project in my new career in Marketing at Carestream Health. For example, if two years ago my supervisor had given me a file of data and said, ‘Find something useful that we can do with this,’ I would have had no idea where to start. But that exact scenario happened to me early on, and I found that I had a lot of ideas that could positively impact our business.

Our in-class Experiential Learning assignments were often like that. The assignments were always challenging, but I grew as a result of the work I put in. Doing a project with Kodak, for example, we were given relatively loose guidelines as to what the managers’ business goals were, but we had the opportunity to go in any direction that we felt would be the best fit. I’m finding that this is really what managers look for from newly-graduated MBAs. They want us to identify areas of opportunity within the company, and to suggest actionable plans for improvement. I was given an initial set of projects, but I’ve found that I can expand the scope of those projects based on opportunities that I identify. People are very receptive to my suggestions, and I am confident in my ability to make them in the first place. I feel very strongly that this is a result of Experiential Learning assignments at Whitman.”