More About Our 2024 Scholarship Winner

What inspired you to pursue your field of study?

Knowing that I wanted to pursue business, and having a love for food and the industry led me to study food marketing at SJU. Once I started my academic journey at Saint Joe's, I began to hear about our business intelligence and analytics major and the value that it holds. After taking some basic classes about business analytics, I decided to pursue BIA as a second major. This in combination with my food marketing classes allows me not only to get a deeper understanding of data used in day-to-day operations but also to clean and sort significant data to make recommendations.

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What advice would you give to other young women who are interested in pursuing a similar career path as you?

I would tell another young woman who is interested in a similar career path to step out of their comfort zone and say "yes" more often. While it may not always be something that you want to do, or a sacrifice may need to be made, stepping outside of your comfort zone and saying "yes" has led me to have great business experiences and opportunities. You learn the most in times when you are pushing yourself. People will take note of this, and ultimately, thats when most doors start to open.

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Are there any role models or mentors who have inspired you to pursue your career? If so, how have they influenced your journey?

In my life, my mother has been my role model. She is such a strong woman, who raised me to push myself as a person and as a lifelong learner while always being a good friend and family member. She works in schools, so while she does not always know the best way to help me, she is always supporting me. Within the industry, I look up women in leadership. One in particular who I admire is Carrie L. Anderson who is the CFO of Campbell's Soup Co. When I interned with them last summer, I heard her talk about her story and come up to a leadership position and was inspired. She shared that she had a tough conversation with her husband about whose career would be going further and the steps and assistance needed from both sides to get her to a leadership position. These women influenced my journey by providing me with the foundation of who I am as a person, and by setting an example that women can do anything they set their mind to no matter the field.

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Can you describe a moment or experience when you realized the potential of artificial intelligence to transform the business world? 

Artificial intelligence has been around for a while now but only started to gain major buzz within the last few years. Tools such as Grammarly have been used to assist people of all ages across many fields. Taking this tool and being able to apply it in other fields is huge. An early moment when I realized how AI could transform the business world was after a conference when I was involved in a conversation about the different directions in the food industry may be able to take advantage of AI tools such as ChatGPT. Something that we came up with was the possibility of using it as a marketing tool through a paid partnership. An example of this would be stating specific brands or products when providing recipes.