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Topics of Interest: Productivity tips, career advice, webinar, advertising, marketing
We often catch up with our alumni to hear their stories about their ups and downs, what drives them, and what inspires them to do more. Many of them chat with us about their experiences, which often range from topics like crisis management to the latest merger deal they closed. Several offer great tips of advice that students can act on in class or on the job. In any case, the benefit goes to our readers who gather great insights from our chats. Recently, we had the opportunity to meet with an alum who has a knack for providing helpful advice to students and professionals alike who seek to be more efficient in their careers – with an impressive track record to boot.
Canfield BHP alum, Arjun Desai, is a 2012 graduate with a degree in business honors and marketing. With a stellar career in marketing and digital advertising spanning almost 10 years, Arjun has worked with big-name companies such as LinkedIn, Apple and Sabre. Since graduating, he has built up an incredible list of accomplishments and knows a thing or two about how to boost your work performance.
Fortunately, we booked Arjun to share his tips in a webinar on Tips to Unleash Your Work Performance for the benefit of our current students and recent alumni (or any professional for that matter!). Read on to hear from Arjun about his career path and snag a sneak peek into some of the tips he’ll be talking about in the webinar. Be sure to catch it on Tuesday, July 20 at 6 pm CT. RSVP by clicking the image above or register at bit.ly/3xo29Kk.
Tell us a little bit about yourself and what your journey has been like since you graduated.
It’s been almost 10 years since I graduated from [Canfield] BHP. I reflect over the last decade and I’m so grateful for a wonderful journey. I focused my career in technology and marketing. Growing up, I always had a fascination with tech. I was a guy fixing all the computers in the house and setting up the internet. I’ve also loved writing and storytelling my entire life and was able to merge that into a field I love. I started my career in travel tech working for Sabre, which is a travel technology company in Dallas.
But my heart was set on moving to San Francisco, and I lived there for 6 years. I worked in a few different places: first, at Apple to run email marketing for the App Store & iTunes. Then I switched over to product marketing at AdRoll and now at LinkedIn for the last four and a half years. Recently, I moved to NYC to start a new chapter in my life. Outside of work, I love anything creative: including writing a weekly blog plus singing too.
How did you come across the job opportunity at LinkedIn?
This is where I feel the power of community, and what I love about being part of Canfield BHP. When I was a senior, I reached out to Sudeep Cherian, a Canfield BHP graduate from Houston who was a few years senior to me. He had just started at LinkedIn. I sent him an InMail: “I love your journey and I’d love to learn from you. Can we connect?”. We had a quick meeting. I kept up with him for 4 years and then in 2016, I reached out to him and said, “I’m in the market for a new job” and he says, “Why don’t you come and interview for a role on my team” so I did and ended up getting that job.
Tell us about your webinar. What will you be discussing?
This is always something I’ve thought about﹘the value of writing and content. Almost a decade ago, I worked on a content series when I was a senior at Canfield BHP. I partnered with a few members of my graduating class to write a “BHP Senior Newsletter”. We wrote about topics like investing, taxes, housing, insurance, even cooking and we brought in perspectives from different BHP alumni and professors. I feel very passionate about coaching too; I was a Peer Advisor at BBA Career Services office and loved helping folks prepare for their professional experiences.
I reflected on that experience and I said, “You know what? It’s been 10 years since that point. I’d like to do something similar for students and give back to the community that’s given me so much.” This time, I wanted to focus on Canfield BHP students starting their internships & full-time jobs and show how they can do things that help set them apart. Canfield BHP does a great job of that already, but I wanted to give a perspective from someone who’s been working for awhile and share some new perspectives
In my webinar, I’ll be giving tips to help unleash their performance. These include tips on managing email, running better meetings, and working with your manager. Think of these as the “unspoken rules” that can advance your career and get folks to excel.
Can you share what one or two of those tips might be?
One of the tips is called “The Second Brain”. That means supercharging your calendar to attack your schedule. This is a way to manage your schedule to be your most effective.
Another tip is called “Boo. No Ghost.” which is how to run an effective 1:1 meeting with your manager, leaving no surprises and not scare them 🙂 One of the best ways to manage your career is developing a strong relationship with your boss, and I go into detail on that.
What do you expect students to take away from this webinar?
I would like to give tips that are simple to understand and easy to act on starting from Day 1. And then go further by sharing templates they can leverage on their own. If a student feels 10% better about their job after attending my webinar, that would be a gift.
Regarding your time at Canfield BHP, was there any particular class or professor you felt provided you with some of the advice or life tools that helped get you where you are today?
One that comes to mind is Professor Ellen Morrison, who taught BA324-H, which is our business communication class. It was such an excellent class on how to create strong communication, both verbally and written, and how to connect with strong business language. Business communication has helped me more than I can ever remember because that’s the type of work I do every day in that field. That’s what great leaders and great performers do. They have strong written and verbal communication and that class stood apart for me.
What advice can you give Canfield BHP students?
Number one is, follow your talent and not your passion. I truly believe you can get good at something in the first 5 years of working and you’ll start to enjoy that. It might be different from what you imagined. Think of things that you’re naturally good at that maybe friends ask you for help on, that you naturally pick up easily, then double down on it in the first 10 years of your career and you’ll do so well. You’ll likely end up liking what you do when you do things well.
The second piece of advice is to unlock your creative side. I fundamentally believe that everyone has a creator inside of them. It could be drawing, cooking, writing, music, knitting, singing, really anything that you make. I always give folks advice to advance that somewhere because it’ll make you feel more complete. For me, I recently got into singing, writing, and trying to learn guitar.
If you have a bad day at the job (everyone has bad days), you can come home and lean into your creative hobby. It really will help you. I believe that we all should make a dent in the universe. Doing something and putting something out there in the world is one of the most human and most rewarding experiences that I could recommend for everyone.