Sorry, I couldn’t help myself.

I think the most useful thing that I got out of all these assignments was really just applying the concepts that we learned in class. Having to combine our knowledge with actual industry practice and then critically analyzing the result is an important skill to have both for academics and real life. I really appreciated having the opportunity to do the analysis and then get constructive feedback on our work as well.

Doing these assignments also gave me an in-depth look into the world of marketing. As consumers, you only really ever see the end result of all of the work that a marketing department does, and sometimes that’s part of the magic of it all. It was eye-opening to see how much work goes into a marketing campaign, and that was just for the relatively simple analysis we did for Lululemon. It’s easy to look in from the outside and point fingers and say ‘this was a success’ or ‘this was a failure’, but to actually construct a campaign from start to finish and not conclusively knowing whether or not it will be successful sounds like a scary, scary thing. I have major respect for marketers.

If I’ve learned anything from all of these team assignments that I’ve had so far at Sauder, it’s that your teammates can make or break your project. Fortunately, I had a really great, supportive, and hardworking group of teammates to work with, which is probably why I had such a good experience for these assignments. I learned a lot!