Daniel Miyares: Student Spotlight

Daniel_MiyaresMaryland native Daniel Miyares has always had his heart set on the south. When he visited UT as a high school student, he fell in love with Austin’s great people, fun activities, and pleasant weather. He applied to BHP not knowing the magnitude of opportunities, benefits, and connections it has to offer. Once he began his freshman year, he quickly realized BHP was “pretty spectacular in terms of, not only the rankings, but the opportunities BHP provides on campus and post graduation.” He is a BHP and MIS major and will graduate in May 2019.

Daniel came to UT knowing that he wanted to get involved in the start-up community and create his own business, but as he started to define his college experience, a passion for social entrepreneurship and social responsibility developed. He is currently interning at a social enterprise in Austin, Care2Rock. The company will soon be pitching to a start-up incubator, and he is helping them prepare. Care2Rock is a small office, with only two full-time employees, and is in the early stages of development. Care2Rock is launching an online music tutoring platform that will positively impact the foster care community nationwide. During the course of his internship, he has identified a referral program to help them grow and expand their customer acquisition efforts, assisted in optimizing their operations, and supported other business efforts.

Daniel also interned for ZeeMee, a venture-backed startup based in Mountain View, CA, which provides an online platform for students to express themselves in a social-media friendly, three-dimensional way throughout the college and job application processes. ZeeMee is currently partnered with more than 200 colleges, from the University of Oklahoma to Carnegie Mellon, to Morehouse, who allow students to submit their pages as part of their application. Daniel worked with their outreach and their operations teams, and spent most of the last school year coordinating their internship program. Daniel characterizes ZeeMee as “an ideal of a successful startup because of their mutual respect for each other, unrelenting drive, and fun-loving attitude.”

On campus, Daniel is heavily involved in the UT Longhorn Entrepreneurship Agency. Daniel was also part of the Launchpad program, a branch of Freshmen Founders, last year as a freshman, and is now directing the program. The Launchpad program works with aspiring first-year students who are excited about entrepreneurship, but don’t know how to start. The Freshman Founders Program offers a semester long, immersive introduction to the UT and the Austin startup community. The program is a sequence of entrepreneurial seminars, workshops, and events meant to allow participants to network with the Austin startup community, and aimed at teaching them about on-campus resources available for student entrepreneurs. The organization also connects students with mentors. Daniel says he has been blown away by what students have done this year in the launch pad program.

Daniel attributes much of his success to the community of high-caliber students he has bonded with in BHP. “They are not only highly intelligent and have founded their own companies, but they have great personalities and we can share laughs.”

Major Representatives Help Students Choose Additional Business Major

For the past two years, BHP has sought out upperclassmen representing each business major to serve as Major Representatives. Major Representatives are available to help underclassmen trying to determine which business major would be the best fit for them. Although BHP students do not need to take on another business major, most choose to do so and the choice of which one to pursue can be a difficult one.

Senior Kruti Mehta is serving as a major representative for Management Information Systems (MIS). Kruti came into UT planning to do pre-med, but realized freshman year she didn’t want to pursue that path anymore.

“One day I woke up and decided I didn’t want to be a pre-med student anymore. So I  did the only thing I could think of and ran straight to the BHP office, having no idea what I wanted or how to even ask for help,” said Kruti. “I must have looked so terrified when I got there, because the upperclassman working the desk immediately left his chair and came and sat on the couches with me. And an hour later, I was still sitting there, except five to six additional upperclassmen had joined the discussion.  A few hours and many conversations later, I finally left the office, relieved. I’ll never forget the immense gratitude I felt towards these students that willingly came to the rescue of a lost freshman that they didn’t even know. I still think back on this day as one of my favorite memories from being a part of this program.”

Kruti encourages students to visit with a major representative or another upperclassman if they need help figuring out what they would enjoy doing or are just looking for a dependable friend to help guide them.

BHP has devoted a page of our current student site to our major representatives. On this page, students can read about why these students chose their major, what specific skills they associate with the major and why they would recommend the major to other students. Their contact information is also provided for students who are interested in contacting them to learn more about their experience in the major.

Additionally, BHP will host a Major Representatives Coffee Chat on Monday, October 17 from 5-6 pm in the GSB Event Room. This event will give students the opportunity to visit with all of the reps and ask them questions about the specific path they are considering. Please RSVP for this event in advance.

Senior Nadia Senter is living her dream working for Universal Music Group

nadia-senterBHP senior Nadia Senter has wanted to work in the music industry since high school. She got her wish when she landed a coveted internship with the Grammys, which then led to an even more coveted internship with Universal Music Group (UMG), eventually leading to a full-time job with UMG which she will start this summer. It has been a long journey full of hard work and persistence, but that persistence has paid off.

As a senior in high school at Westlake High School in Austin, Nadia called nearly 100 places in Austin trying to land her first internship in the music industry. Finally one person, Freddie Krc, said yes, and took her on. Freddie owns his own record label, has a lot of music industry connections and he was a governor on the board of The Recording Academy, which administers the Grammys. He encouraged her to get involved in GrammyU in college.

Each year GrammyU hires two interns from each of their chapters who are juniors. Nadia landed the internship her junior year. It isn’t your typical internship, as it is a year-round commitment and requires 20 hours a week. It was through a connection she made at GrammyU that Nadia made an introduction to UMG.

The UMG interview process was rigorous, with multiple rounds of interviews and reference checks for all of her previous jobs. Nadia was one of only 60 students nation-wide to land the internship. Again, she was expected to work year-round, part-time during the year and full-time during the summer. Nadia doesn’t mind the work load, because she loves what she is doing. She is a College and Lifestyle Marketing Representative, serving as UMG’s boots on the ground in Austin. When one of their artist’s comes through, she goes to the show, then reports on the venue, how the show went, the demographics of the audience, and builds relationships with the venues and record stores in Austin. She is also working on new artist development, coming up with ideas to gain exposure with college students in the area.

Once a semester Nadia and the entire intern team are flow to the UMG headquarters in Santa Monica for a type of case competition. Each team is given a new artist and tasked with determining plans for how to market their artist. The teams then pitch their plans to the executives. The interns are also introduced to employees in all departments. If interns in their program do well, they will be hired full-time and will have the opportunity to pick which department they are most interested in working in, so it is important that they understand all the functions at the company. Nadia is still figuring out what function she prefers, but knows she has an interest in entertainment law, and is considering pursuing a law degree in the future.

Reflecting back upon her success in landing these coveted internships, Nadia says networking was the key to her success. “I went to every possible event in the music industry that I could,” she says. “Getting a good mentor, which I had with Freddie, was also important.”

Alumni Spotlight: Taylor Hwang, Class of 1990

Taylor HwangTaylor Hwang, BHP ’90, has had a varied career in emerging technologies and entrepreneurship, working on both coasts, in Korea, and in various industries. He is currently Head of Strategic Relationships at an advanced data analytics company in San Francisco.

While at Booz Allen & Hamilton, you worked on a project in cooperation with Netscape that turned out to be the world’s first global intranet. Tell me more about that project and what you learned from it.

The firm was using itself as a guinea pig to determine what could be offered to clients. Netscape was an unknown company at the time, and we needed external expertise about internet-based technology since we didn’t know much about it. Netscape sent one of their technical experts, who turned out to be Marc Andreessen {editor’s note: Marc is co-founder of Netscape and is one of six inductees to the World Wide Web Hall of Fame}. The idea was to create a tool that would serve as a knowledge system. A consultancy runs off the knowledge of experts in-house. The existing culture was such that if you were the particular subject matter expert, you would hoard that knowledge so that related projects had to come to you for expertise.

The knowledge system had the potential to change the existing culture. With the intranet, if you wanted to be the recognized subject matter expert, you had to be the author of the dominant document on that subject which was then shared across the company. The companion project to the launch of the intranet was the development of a change management practice. Up until the mid-90s, the major management consultancies would charge a company a large fee for a report about a particular problem and then it would be up to the client to read and implement the recommendations.  Often the client’s senior leadership wouldn’t really know how to implement the recommended changes, and the changes they tried to implement would frequently fail. Booz Allen recognized that the launch of the intranet knowledge system would require a cultural shift in the company and had to be explicit about how to get colleagues to embrace the changes. We studied how to get organizations to change and used this knowledge on ourselves to adopt the new intranet. We were using ourselves as a guinea pig on two different experiments and both worked very well, much better than most people had anticipated.

Apple heard about the project and decided to provide marketing support, and as a result, anyone who was remotely involved in the project was being hunted by headhunters and offered big positions many of us were unqualified to take. The interesting lesson for me at that early point in my career was that unplanned opportunities can come your way if you’re already working hard toward some meaningful goal.  I didn’t recognize the magnitude of internet technology’s potential and lobby to get on the project. I was forced on the project as a lesson for being too finicky about what projects I was willing to work.  Yet, that experience turned out to be one of the most significantly positive points in my career.

In 2002, you started your own business, EmiFinancial Corporation. What service did your company provide and what lessons in entrepreneurship would you pass on to others who are thinking about or have already started their own business?

Emifinancial provided stored-value MasterCard financial services customized to the unbanked Hispanic immigrant consumer at about half the average annual fees. I started that business in an industry that I had very little exposure to. It worked out okay for me, but I don’t know if it was the right decision. I selected the EmiFinancial business because my industry expertise was in media and entertainment right after the internet bubble burst, and media wasn’t a great industry at the time for a first-time entrepreneur to start a new business. I wanted to go into an industry that provided essentials, and basic financial services is an essential. We did a structured brainstorming and applied weighted prioritization criteria, and the idea for EmiFinancial rose to the top out of 26 ideas. It was important to me that we apply the same kind of rigor in starting a company that we would apply for a client.

In most cases, it is better to be in an industry you understand well. The target demographic was Hispanic immigrants, and I didn’t understand that market at all. It would have been much easier if I went into an industry I understood or was fascinated by. I was just fascinated by the idea of starting a new company and learning a new demographic. Starting a company is one of the hardest jobs. You have to pursue it because you love what it is, and love the gratification of building something, and if it is a consumer business, offering something of value to your customer. I would recommend that if you do find a viable opportunity where you are already interested in the subject matter or audience, that’s usually a good reason to pursue that opportunity.

You spent nearly three years in Seoul, Korea, as a country manager for frog design. How was doing business over there different than doing business in the U.S.?

It was completely different, especially relative to the meritocracy of the Bay Area. Korea, many feel is one of the last strongholds of Confucianist society. It’s like bureaucracy masquerading as philosophy and almost the opposite of meritocracy. If you are an employee working at one of the conglomerates and you start with a number of peers in a certain group, you are a team. If you are contributing more relative to your teammates and advance ahead of the group, the group views you as an enemy at that point, so management will actually suppress your advancement to give the group a chance to catch up and promote corporate harmony. There is also an ageist element to Korean business. As an example, I showed up to a meeting with a conglomerate CEO where his bank of secretaries greeted me. They thought I looked much younger than expected from my title and tried to bar me from meeting the CEO because I was not old enough. That would never happen in Silicon Valley. You frequently encounter 20-something geniuses here who have a great business idea, and you want to take that meeting.

It was a rude awakening to what I was entering into and how different things were going to be. I was grateful for the experience, but I am glad to be back. Korean businessmen also have a very heavy drinking culture, so my liver suffered tremendously.

When you came back from that, you moved into a venture investment role for Proof Ventures, investing in technologies such as the Internet-of-things and voice recognition. Tell me more about what you were doing in that role?

I started the fund, and the original model was to take Korean entrepreneurs succeeding in Korea and help them expand to the U.S. market. The entire market there is still dominated by the conglomerates. A successful Korean entrepreneur with an ideal domestic client list including all the conglomerates will have his or her margins squeezed by the rampant collusion among the giants. With your suppressed margins, there is really nowhere to grow domestically. Even if the conglomerates make you an offer, they don’t make very good offers and will make sure no other conglomerates give you a counter offer to play them off of each other. I thought there was a market to help the entrepreneurs expand to the U.S. When the entrepreneurs enter the U.S. market, they have very little idea what they are doing. I overestimated the Korean entrepreneurs’ ability to adapt to the U.S. market even with full financial, legal, and operational support. I was early to the market. They have such a unique way of operating that is particular to the Korean market and not very adaptive. In the venture capital, it really comes down to the entrepreneurial team succeeding, and if they don’t succeed, your efforts are in vain, which is what we saw.

The experience gave me exposure to a new set of emerging technologies. In tech, you have to have a willingness to dive in and learn the new technologies. Even in my current role, the CEO had to tutor me in advanced data analytics . It’s been 25 years since I touched code, but I’m playing with R Studio to gain context for what our data practitioners are doing for our clients.

Do you have any advice for current BHP students?

I can share an anecdote. I was mentoring entrepreneurs at Draper University and had a chance to meet the new generation of entrepreneurs. Relative to Silicon Valley where there are so many experienced entrepreneurs, these early entrepreneurs are very green. They have an understandable naiveté about what is in front of them which can provide optimism and a clear vision, but you can see that the current models they are pursuing often have a low probability of success. One student had one of the more viable ideas to provide direct mentoring by Silicon Valley engineers to students aspiring to similar positions and also provide a filtered recruiting channel for employers, but he abandoned his model in favor of a startup swag retailing business that didn’t really add significant value to the market place or enhance his more marketable business skills. I shared with him that his criteria for selecting a business to build shouldn’t neglect looking at the long-term value to his career. Even if the desire is to be a serial entrepreneur, you should consider the marketable value of the skills you develop while building your chosen business.

I would also say if you have interest in data-driven insights, you will likely do well to pursue it as a career.  I’m biased in my opinion, but the more I learn, the more I see that business is only scratching the surface of what true data insight can provide, and almost every sector stands to significantly enhance its decisions and planning over the coming decade as data science progresses.  Currently, demand for skilled experts far exceeds supply, and any solid recruit is practically guaranteed a position.

 

Student Spotlight: Amy Enrione

Amy receiving the Rising Star Award

Amy receiving the Rising Star Award

BHP Senior Amy Enrione has accomplished a great deal in her four years here. Coming into the program, she knew she wanted to bring service learning into the curriculum, and through a lot of hard work and perseverance, she was able to accomplish that. She has been honored with multiple awards, including the BBA/MPA Rising Star Award, the Pal—Make a Difference Award, the Texas Exes Presidential Leadership Award, the Cactus StandoUT Award, the BHP Outstanding Student Award, and the UBC George Mitchell Award, and was selected as a finalist for the Texas Parents Outstanding Student Award.

As a student in New York, how did you learn about BHP and what made you decide to choose UT and BHP?

I came from a big Longhorn family. My mom and aunts and uncles all went to UT, so it was always on my radar as a school I should consider. I was interested in business and started looking into McCombs and the Business Honors Program. I was blown away by BHP’s quality of the education. I love working in teams and am not competitive, so the collaborative BHP environment fit my personality. I received the Texas Exes Forty Acres Scholarship, which is a merit-based full-ride, so that made the decision very easy for me.

What do you think out-of-state students don’t know about BHP and UT that you wish they did?

One thing I realized once I decided to come to UT is that BHP’s incredible reputation hasn’t quite spread outside of Texas. My friends really didn’t know how great of a school McCombs is—it was never a school they’d considered. This lack of knowledge about the school is a real shame, so I try plug the program and UT to my connections in NY whenever possible.

You worked hard to bring the community service requirement to UT. What was the process for doing that and where does it stand now?

I started by doing a lot of research on what other schools are doing, particularly Wharton’s Management 100 class. The thing I liked most about Wharton was that every business freshman did skills-based service as part of their core curriculum. I think it is so important to give back to your community using your specific talents. When I saw UT didn’t have a similar program, I decided I wanted to bring that opportunity to UT. I also didn’t want that program at Wharton to be a selling point over UT for future students.

After researching the benefits of active learning and engagement and the pros and cons of the Wharton model, I wrote a proposal and brought it to Dr. Prentice. He felt it was worth pursuing, so he brought my proposal to the Undergraduate Program Committee, who provided feedback on it. We then I presented the idea to Dean Platt, the BBA dean. He became a huge advocate for it. I had originally envisioned it as a full class, but we kept running into issues trying to do that. We brainstormed and came back to the table with a shorter requirement targeted all freshmen. After two years of work, a four hour service requirement launched in 2014 as part of the McCombs Freshmen Interest Group (FIG) program. We worked with the Undergraduate Program Office and the Longhorn Center for Community Engagement to bring the requirement to life. The LCCE, particularly Dr. Katie Pritchett and Dr. Suchi Gururaj, have been hugely instrumental in the process of implementing this program.

The impact of the program has been incredible; I’m so glad that we’ve been able to connect McCombs students with their communities in a meaningful way. In the first year the program had a $51,000 impact on the City of Austin, and this year the impact grew to $54,000. To incentive students, we created a friendly competition between FIGs that measured service hours per student. 92% of McCombs freshmen participated in the program. The LCCE published a study on the service requirement, and found that 71% of students felt more connected to their FIG and McCombs because of the service.

What was the next step after having launched a successful program at McCombs?

This year I started working on bringing that program University-wide. The two-year McCombs pilot was instrumental in bringing a service component of FIGs school-wide; it made it very easy to show the University that a service requirement was impactful and didn’t cost much money. I worked with the LCCE to provide the FIG mentors with all the materials they needed to implement the program. The LCCE has already trained all of next year’s the FIG mentors in how to facilitate a meaningful service project and post-service reflection; the service requirement will officially be a part of the FIG curriculum next fall for all UT freshmen.

I am also trying to get service learning courses to be recognized on the registrar so students can search for those classes easily. We think this will really increase demand for service learning courses. This project is still in the works and we will hopefully be working with the new Provost to do something in the future.

What do you feel you will leave having accomplished over your four years here?

I feel that my biggest lasting legacy will be the community service program. It is now institutionalized and will continue to take place for the foreseeable future. My work in this area will continue to have impact far after I leave campus. On a personal level, I have really enjoyed mentoring and giving back to the BHP community. I still grab lunch with and run case interviews with some of my mentees from last year through the BHP Peer Mentor Program. I hope my dedication to helping my peers has inspired people to really invest in each other.

How did you successfully juggle all your activities and school work?

I am very organized and love calendars and check lists. They really help me plan out my day. I plan down to the 15-minute block. I also color-code my calendars so I know what I am spending time on during the week. If I see something is taking over my week, I can prioritize and not commit to another event for that organization.

I also don’t commit to things I’m not passionate about. I try to only join organizations or take leadership positions because I really care about the org. That way, I am motivated by my activities because I am doing the things I enjoy. This strategy helps me avoid burn-out, even with a packed schedule.

If you could go back and give advice to yourself as a freshman, what would you say?

Freshman me was really ambitious and that certainly helped. Keep that drive and enthusiasm because that is what gets you places, but also be willing to re-evaluate and adjust what you are doing. I was really set on a certain path and even when I realized it wasn’t the best path for me, I stayed with it longer than I should have. At some point I realized I needed to cut ties with things I wasn’t passionate about, but this point came a bit late for me. I would have had a lot more time to do the things I cared about if I had cut ties sooner. I am currently not involved in anything I was involved in freshman year. It takes times to find the things you love and figure out what really excites you. You don’t really know yourself yet as a freshman. Know that it is okay to let go.

What’s next for you?

I will be working as a Business Analyst for McKinsey & Company in Houston. I will be a generalist, but I love operations and pricing, so I am going to try to focus on these areas. In the long-term I want to work in the non-profit sector. I want to learn as much as I can about operational effectiveness while at McKinsey, and then use that expertise to streamline operations for an education nonprofit.