Student Profile: Creative Business

Sarah Pickard '09
Pre-SOM: BlackRock
Budget Officer, Arts & Culture Club
Summer Internship: PepsiCo

My father is a lawyer, and my mother is an artist. So I've always had both the left brain and the right brain drives. I painted and played the violin in high school, but I chose not to play the violin professionally; it's very lonely. I like working with people, being part of the world, making decisions. So after studying history and literature in college, I somewhat incongruously went to work on Wall Street.

I worked in equity research for four years, mostly covering banks. I got a really strong financial base. I wanted to learn about how companies make decisions, so I became a consultant for financial institutions, and later did fixed-income portfolio management on the client management side. But I realized my creative interests couldn't just be extracurricular. I need them to be part of my career.

I looked for an MBA program that would support my looking at business and art in an interdisciplinary way. SOM was the only business school I applied to.

When I came to visit, I loved the school. The new curriculum was just being implemented. I was captured by the idea of looking at businesses not through siloed functions but from the perspectives of various roles.

Looking back on my assumptions I had about the way the world works when I came in, it’s clear to me that business school is a really transformational experience, especially at Yale. We do all this work with the Leadership Development Program and the Careers course where we unpack how to build our careers and our personal lives.

When I first arrived, I was totally taken by surprise by how much work it is. And by how important group work is. Working in finance, I didn’t have much opportunity to learn how to lead others. As an analyst or an associate, I was at the bottom of the totem pole. But at SOM when you're given an ambiguous problem and put in a room with three peers, you learn. Who's going to take the lead? How are you going to divide the work? How are you going to bring all the ideas together? It's very challenging. It’s a great laboratory.

I worked at PepsiCo this past summer in marketing. Initially, I thought I wanted a smaller company. But I went to their recruiting presentation and was really impressed. The CEO, Indra Nooyi, is an SOM alum. Her goal is "performance with purpose" — they’re not just about profitability but thinking about the human and environmental impacts of their products.

After that early hesitance, I actually ended up falling in love with the company over the summer. I learned so much. I loved what I was doing and the people I was working with. Next year I'll continue the work I did as an intern. I’ll be an assistant brand manager. I am really excited.

Marketing is very creative. It's very visual. It's reaching into things that you can't quantify. What do people want? What's "in" right now? And how is this product going to meet that need? You can reach into anything.

Interviewed October 14, 2008.