IA02 Role Model

I chose to interview Courtney Noal as my role model. I chose Courtney because she is a great person to look up to and is very responsible and professional. Courtney is a Senior at Chatham University and is a studying for as an Arts and Management major while double minoring in Marketing and Museum Studies. Courtney graduated in 2015 from Hollidaysburg Area Senior High School and began Chatham in the fall of 2015.

At Chatham Courtney is a very involved student. She is the President of the Chatham Marketing Association (CMA)  and helps with the Bonner Leader program. Courtney has been the president of CMA for the past two school years, before that she served as the VP of Social Impact. Her sophomore and junior year she worked for the Pittsburgh Center for Arts. This past summer Courtney interned for Arts Altoona, an organization working to bring arts into the Blair County Area. Currently, Courtney is interning in the Learning and Visitor Department at the Frick Museum. As she is beginning her senior year here at Chatham, she is looking into attending a graduate school for Museum education.

As a senior now in college, Courtney has definitely done a lot of studying and had a lot of advice for studying. Courtney’s biggest tip is to have a well organized and detailed planner. She organizes all of her days with all of the homework and even little things she needs to do throughout the day. She says that she writes down everything since she has so much going on and she doesn’t want to forget to do anything. She also recommends in class taking paper notes instead of typing them because writing helps memory more. She will often rewrite things while studying if she needs to learn it more. Courtney says she will make sure she studies a lot for all of her tests and will use flashcards to memorize terms or ideas. Her biggest advice was to not stress over one bad grade as long as you gave it your best try. She made it clear that it will happen and to just make sure that you try even harder on the next test.

Courtney is definitely an expert in building a good professional portfolio, one of her top tips in general was to build a strong relationship with professors. She said that having a good relationship with professors will get you name out there more and will allow for them to recommend you for things they see on and off campus. Courtney also advised looking at the emails that Ginger sends out for the business department as there is some great information about events happening on campus. As well as attending the Business Mixers and events held on campus since Chatham has some well-known and respected Pittsburgh companies that come to these events. To fully benefit from these mixers Courtney recommended taking the time to email some of the people I may have met, thank them for talking to me, and ask to learn more about them; She says that this will it let them know that I am interested and motivated to make these connections. She also talked a lot about both the Chatham Marketing Association as well as the American Marketing Association. She recommended joining the American Marketing Association and taking advantage of the different online courses and certificates they offer. As well as getting involved with the hands on projects that CMA is involved in. She said making sure that I am doing hands on things that can be talked about during an interview is important. She recommended attending the regional and national conferences if possible because they are great places to learn good business skills as well as meet connections in the business field.

I feel that the interview I had with Courtney is very similar to the one I looked at on the Chatham Business Insight Page. A lot of the same questions were asked and similar advice was given. Both Courtney and the Rachel, from the interview I looked at, both advised getting a good internship and learning as much as you possibly can from it. Both Courtney and Rachel also claimed a lot of their success to their close relationship with their professors, both saying how important and helpful it is and how at Chatham it is very easy to do and heavily recommended. Both of them were also involved in organization like CMA and Accounting Club on campus.  In class, similar things have been mentioned to what both of them were saying. I has been mentioned in class several times the importance of having open communication with professor and how important that is to your success. We have had several speaker come in stressing getting involved on campus in the different clubs available to us and building out portfolio.