Maddie McMurray

After working in the world of tech startups in talent acquisition, California-native Maddie McMurray was ready for a change. While they knew they wanted to continue working in a people-centered role, they felt that the recruiting space was not the right fit for their long-term career. “I was really interested in watching the ways that people operated both formally and informally in organizations, and an MBA was going to allow me to not only begin understanding more of the ways that people formally and informally operate, but the foundations that they operate within as well,” Maddie says.

Maddie was drawn to Emory for its sense of community and culture. “Emory's close-knit community really spoke to me, even though we were coasts away. Welcome Weekend was really when I came on campus and got to experience the feeling of the Emory community. It reinforced that there is something very special about the community here, and the kinds of support that exist between students, faculty and administration, as well as alumni,” Maddie says.

One experience that stood out for Maddie was being able to work with a team of students during the Goizueta IMPACT program. The fall semester is dedicated to teaching students how to build the foundational skills of problem solving, and in the spring, each team is assigned a client with a real-world problem. Maddie and their team were assigned a local coffee shop where they had to develop a strategy to increase sales without introducing new customers. “I really loved being able to take my understanding of finance, my understanding of marketing, my understanding of operations, and the experience that I was bringing into business school to apply it with all the experience that my teammates had to solve this company's problem,” Maddie says. “It was a really unique opportunity to work with team members who had strengths that I myself was working to grow and could lean on them to teach me a couple of things and give feedback.”