1. What is your title, and what does that entail?I’m the Senior Director of Globalized Learning and Professional Advancement in Gatton’s Graham Office of Career Management, our in-house career center. Simply put, my job is to build experience-bridges between the classroom and the world of work: designing programs where students take what they’re learning and apply it in the field. That largely lives in two places that, for me, are really just one: career development, where we help students design and execute on their professional goals, and international education, where I co-direct programs that take that growth abroad. Globalized learning is a powerful driver of professional development, and that intersection is where I live. Day to day, I’m part career counselor, part program designer, part course instructor, but all of it is in service of helping students up their get-hired game, take charge of their future, and design a life aligned with how they define success.
2. Tell us a little about you and your journey to Gatton.My path to UK and Gatton started, fittingly, in the business of helping people experience new cultures. After studying Speech Communication and French Linguistics at the University of Georgia, in my home state, I went to work for the Walt Disney Company as an interpreter and global cast member trainer at Disney World, specifically preparing French cast members to work at Epcot’s French Pavilion in Orlando: coaching them on their English and the cross-cultural skills they’d need to succeed in their roles. Working at Disney World was a front-row look at how a global operation really runs, and 20+ years later, I’ve still never left that intersection of business, language, and culture. That early-career launch of mine directly inspired the Imagine the Magic Project I deliver in Business Goes Global: Paris, where my students explore the cross-company strategies driving business operations at Disneyland Paris. Each year, our time studying the Paris park always brings back happy memories of that early chapter in Orlando. The parks can nearly pass as identical twins in their design, so for me it generates this bizarre sense of disorientation, and every year I have to remind myself that I’m in Paris, not Orlando. 😊 From there I joined Rotary International’s global exchange team in Quebec City, Canada, promoting international exchange programs while completing a graduate certificate in French translation at Université Laval, where my Rotary post was based. That’s actually where everything clicked for me, career-wise: realizing a campus could also be a workplace (funny how you don’t necessarily notice that when you’re a student, LOL), and watching people transform themselves through experiences abroad, I knew higher education was where I wanted to anchor my career, and I’ve been on that path ever since. I earned master’s degrees in Strategic Communication and in Adult and Higher Education Career Counseling, where the two halves of what I now do — how people communicate and how people build careers — came together.Before UK, I was part of the Career Services team at Morehead State University, where my director and I were tapped to co-author the framework for what became the university's $2.5M Quality Enhancement Plan, built around high-impact experiences like internships and education abroad. That work opened a door to do similar work here at UK, and it crystallized a conviction I’ve carried since: the most durable learning happens when students do the thing, not just study it.So, I joined Graham in 2019 as its Assistant Director and have served as Senior Director since 2022, where my focus is applied learning and international education as drivers of career development. The Graham team is world-class, and our collective work spans career advising, employer engagement, leadership development, and global opportunity. What drew to Graham was the chance to build that conviction at scale (the most durable learning happens when students do the thing, not just study it); what’s kept me here is watching it work. Business Goes Global: Paris represents all of it.
3. Where did you travel with students this past summer, and what did you see and learn?This past summer I co-directed Business Goes Global: Paris, as I have since 2024, alongside Shane Hadden in Finance. It’s a genuinely cross-disciplinary program: Shane teaches a business-finance course and I teach a business-communication course, so students study global commerce through both a numbers lens and a comm lens. Both courses are required for all 5 Gatton majors, so we have a fantastic mix of students on every cohort. And there’s no better classroom for it than Paris, because it’s home to more Fortune 500 headquarters than any other business hub in the EU.The heart of the program Shane and I have built is embedded access to industry and hands-on learning. The specific mix is dynamic year to year, which keeps the program fresh: in addition to our work exploring the Disneyland Paris Resort — yep, we spend a sun-up-to-sun-down day at the park, which means time for business and time for the magic — this past summer our students also sat across from senior leaders at the European Commission, ODDO BHF, Murex, and Delirium, while past partners have included Station F, the world’s largest startup campus, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Whoever’s on the partner roster, the throughline holds: students see how policy, finance, fintech, and cross-border comm strategy actually move in real organizations. The capstone is a micro-internship built around Disneyland Paris, where teams analyze how the company’s entertainment brands — Pixar, Marvel, and the rest — partner with in-park corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola and Ben & Jerry’s to power operations. Our student-teams focused on the business-communication strategies at play, producing capstone work around press releases, corporate memos, and persuasive reports, all informed by the real-world exemplars from those global brands.What I re-learn every year is that immersion does powerful work for learning. Watching a student realize a theme park isn’t just rides and popcorn but in fact is a deeply sophisticated business … or watching one tour ODDO BHF and put a question to a senior leader in real time: that’s career readiness forming right in front of you. They come home more curious, more adaptable, and more confident, because they’ve done the whole thing somewhere genuinely unfamiliar and done it well. And it shows downstream: our BGG alumni convert these experiences into real opportunities, with offers at firms like PwC, UBS, and Baird.
4. What are your aspirations for your programming going forward?Beyond BGG Paris, I’m also part of the team that builds the architecture of our full-semester spring program in Rome, the Gatton Global Leadership Experience. Alongside a full slate of business courses taught in English at our partner campus, students pursue part-time, English-speaking internships with Italian companies in data analytics, consulting, economic research, and more. Those organizations have international reach, so our students bring a valued global lens all their own to the work they do beside their Italian colleagues.When I’m recruiting for the program, here’s what I tell students: Think of the premise behind the Netflix hit, Emily in Paris: it’s Emily’s American perspective that proves so valuable to her Paris-based team, precisely because they need their work to resonate with global audiences. Her outside vantage point is fundamental to the value she brings, in addition to her savvy as a business professional. Our students in Rome deliver value to their Italian colleagues in much the same way, and it’s exciting to see. I share that to say this: whether it’s a micro-internship in Paris or a full internship in Rome, my aspiration for every global program I help build stays the same: that it offers industry-aligned, hands-on learning that lets students fully imagine themselves in the world of work after graduation. And it’s more than valuable resume real estate, though it’s certainly that, in spades. For me it’s seeing the confidence, the excitement, the student saying “I actually love this — and I know it because I did it, not in theory but in action.” I see it in Paris, in Rome, and in the LinkedIn posts of every student when they get home. That’s the why behind everything I do.
5. How have you seen alumni help, and how can they help now and in the future?Alumni are the quiet engine behind so much of what happens in the Graham Office. I’ve watched them open doors to company visits, come back to mentor students walking the path they once walked, and hire the very students they met through our programs. One of our team’s signature applied learning programs, Industry Intersections, hinges on exactly that. Here’s how alumni can help now, in three words: access, mentorship, and support. Access: if you sit inside an organization, here or abroad, that could give students a window into real global business, that door you can open is worth more than you might imagine. Mentorship: students coming home from Paris (or Rome, or any of the amazing global locations our faculty teach in) are eager to figure out what’s next, and an hour of your time is enormous; the Graham Office hosts alumni-led panels and workshops throughout the year, and students flock to them: it’s usually standing room only in Woodward Hall for these events! Support: programs abroad transform lives, but cost is the single biggest barrier that keeps some deserving students from going, and scholarship support is the most direct way to put a student on the plane. If global experiences shaped you in your own career, much as my early career in France and Quebec shaped me, the most powerful thing you can do is make international education possible for the next student.
