Category: Student Experience

How did you two end up working together? And what’s the story with this name “Blark!” that follows you everywhere?

Blake: “Blark!” started as an inside joke. It’s a play on our two names.

Clark: In case that wasn’t obvious.

Blake: We flash it at the end of each video as a production credit in the Owen Podcast Series. We didn’t think anyone would notice, but as our first year progressed, our classmates co-opted “Blark!” and began referring to us as a single entity. So I guess at least a few of them had been watching.

Clark: We suspect they started using it because they hadn’t bothered to learn our individual names yet.

Blake: Well, to be fair, we didn’t exactly make it easy for people to differentiate us. We’re both from Texas and we both majored in marketing as undergrads at Texas A&M. We both joined OwenBloggers at the beginning of our first year and started working for the school’s Marketing and Communications office as social media consultants. We both have dark glasses and wives who are arguably out of our leagues. People act like we must be lifelong friends, but one year ago we’d never met.

Clark: Well, that’s not exactly true. As we’ve recently pieced together, we apparently met at a house party as undergrads, just after Blake started dating his future wife, Kristi, who happened to have a couple of classes with me. More than likely, we were loitering around the keg and talking about music, since Blake was in a popular local band at the time and I secretly idolize musicians. And that was it.

Blake: After the chance encounter, we went our separate ways. I had a pretty unique hybrid background of marketing and design, and so I worked for two successful startups in Dallas as their one-man marketing machine. Clark … I don’t even know why he got a marketing degree.

Clark: Yeah, I put it to good use. I started in state and local tax at KPMG and then joined the internal strategy group at Texas Children’s Hospital.

Blake: But Owen brought us back together.

Clark: It was very much like the movie Serendipity.

Blake: Strikingly similar. My wife recognized Clark’s name on the list of admitted students, which prompted an email, which prompted calls, which prompted meeting up before school even started.

Clark: All of which prompted lots and lots of scheming. We definitely both have an innate drive to create stuff when we think there’s a need. Or, in the parlance of our peers, to “blue sky” it.

So how did the Owen Podcast Series come together?

Blake: Early on, we agreed that Owen, and just about every other business school we visited, could have a more robust media library. This would allow prospective students to feel like they really know the school’s people and culture during their search process, even before visiting the campus to experience it firsthand.

Clark: This notion was the seed of the Owen Podcast Series, which built upon previous Owen podcasts by adding an interview format and bringing in an eclectic mix of guests, ranging from faculty members to community leaders to local business owners. The goal is to showcase everything that makes Owen and the surrounding community unique.

Blake: Prospective students don’t just care about the curriculum and pedigree of the schools they seek out. That’s important, but they also care about the culture and social activities outside the walls of academia. It’s a package deal, something we were keenly aware of after talking our wives into dropping everything and moving to Nashville. Based on that, we knew that prospective students and their partners want to know they’ll have some fun during the whole grad school experience.

Clark: The city of Nashville has a strong creative class and a strong entrepreneurial spirit. It’s a lot more than a country music scene, or even a health care scene, although it obviously has all of those things, too. We really believe the city is a key part of the Owen value proposition.

Blake: We found the school to be incredibly fertile ground for organic, student-led innovation. Before stepping foot in a classroom, we brought our podcast idea to the admissions team, who saw it as a great marketing tool, not only for prospective students but the Owen community at large. We were then put in touch with Yvonne Martin-Kidd, Executive Director of Marketing and Communications.

And how did the idea go over?

Clark: We were two anonymous, overeager students. They could have easily scoffed. But after presenting our vision, the response was overwhelmingly supportive.

Blake: It was, “What do you need to get going? Cameras? We have HD, Flip, handhelds and studio lights. Microphones? We have lapels and handhelds, all wireless. Anything you need is at your disposal whenever you need them. And, by the way, once you get going we can give you a prominent spot on the new website we’re creating for Owen and possibly include featured podcasts in our newsletters.”

Clark: It was pretty unexpected. They not only signed off on the project, but they wanted to become actively supportive in its success. Blake and I both came from an undergraduate school with almost 50,000 students. Texas A&M has a strong culture of student involvement, but there’s a lot of red tape. In this case, the speed of approval and level of encouragement was incredibly refreshing.

How did you become affiliated with OwenBloggers?

Clark: OwenBloggers has always prided itself in leaving off the veneer, so to speak. It’s far less engaging as a member of an audience when you feel like you’re being pitched to. Everyone in this era has built up a natural layer of skepticism, and when you feel a sales pitch coming on, you immediately put up a mental barrier. We wanted the podcasts to avoid that sheen. It needed a home within the constellation of online touch points at Owen, and it found a kindred spirit in OwenBloggers.

Blake: We were both familiar with the site after visiting it many times as prospective students, and we were excited about the opportunity to partner with something that had a built-in audience and an established brand. The site was flush with material and had a broad international readership, but had outgrown the blogging platform it was created on. We met with the current and past leadership of the site, who were already tossing around the idea of moving the site onto WordPress (a popular blog publishing platform).

So you do some programming as well?

Clark: This was all in Blake’s sweet spot. When we found out about the WordPress initiative, I basically volunteered Blake’s Web design and programming expertise to build the new site. The only thing I more willingly offer than my own time is someone else’s.

Blake: We had the opportunity to combine the veteran OwenBloggers site and the yet-to-be-tested Owen Podcast Series into a multimedia conglomerate, the likes of which had never been seen before … at least in graduate student-led media circles … in the southeast United States … to our knowledge.

Clark: We are basically young Rupert Murdochs. I hope he doesn’t do anything stupid before this article appears.

And all of this is in your first month or so as students?

Clark: I think it sounds more ambitious after the fact. At the time, we just wanted to create content. We were excited about starting the next chapter in our lives and about having access to some really great minds. Honestly, the podcast series was mostly an excuse to reach out to interesting people and pepper them with questions, all under the guise of content creation.

How do you decide on which guests to interview?

Blake: We started looking for guests here at Owen, which is ripe with passionate personalities and big thinkers. We wanted to provide a relaxed, intimate look into people whom incoming students would be interacting with their first year. Faculty such as Michael Burcham, Lecturer of Entrepreneurship; Dave Owens, Professor of the Practice of Management and Innovation; and Larry Van Horn, Associate Professor of Management; as well as Read McNamara, Executive Director of the Career Management Center, all sat down with us to talk about what drives them personally and professionally. While we touch on the requisite questions regarding their roles at Owen, we’re really looking to establish the people behind the message and create a real experience for the viewer. Simple lighting, one camera shot, natural settings, and, with the exception of raucous bird squawks and ambulance noises, very few edits.

Clark: In one of our first episodes, Bart Victor, the Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership, mentions the Carnegie Bargain, which is the mindset that one must first do well financially in order to have the means and freedom to do good philanthropically. And then we talked about the misplaced focus of many organizations on fixing the suffering of poverty instead of alleviating the poverty itself, which is a key tenant in the Project Pyramid courses here at Vanderbilt. It was, at least in my mind, genuinely interesting stuff, and I think that’s when we realized the true potential within the series. Our litmus test has always been: If I’m a prospective student and I stumble upon this, is this compelling? Does it flesh out my opinion of the school? And if the answer is yes, it has some value.

Blake: I think people really connect with genuine passion. It comes through the screen and grabs you as a viewer. When you see a professor speak passionately about something, it helps you uncover what’s behind the syllabus and understand why Owen students are regarded not only for their spreadsheets but also their convictions.

Clark: Once we had our sea legs, we started looking into the community to find local business leaders who are focused on making Nashville unique. No one would call us shy, but it was still daunting to essentially cold call someone to ask them to be on a podcast that’s still more of an idea than a product.

Blake: As it turns out, we had an ace up our sleeve: being students. People are definitely more receptive to the idea of sitting down with students, especially if they can tell you’ve done your homework and know their craft a bit.

Clark: Blake and I have a certain aesthetic, and that aesthetic is good beer and good music.
Blake: We reached out to local companies like Yazoo Brewery, Third Man Records (Jack White’s label) and Hatch Show Prints and asked for an hour of time with the owners. These are all small shops, so their time is valuable, and they’re not hurting for media coverage, not that we even qualify. But when we prefaced the request with “I’m an MBA student from Vanderbilt,” they gladly opened their doors to us.

Clark: I think that’s a testament to two things—the cachet of the Vanderbilt name and the tremendous sense of community here in Nashville.

Blake: At the end of the day, we really enjoy it. We meet incredible people and talk about great ideas. When our podcast with Ben Blackwell, Director of Operations of Third Man Records, was picked up by the local media, there was an admitted sense of pride in knowing our efforts helped raise the local profile of the school.

So what’s next for “Blark!”?

Clark: The hardest part is not coming up with the ideas, or even initially bringing them to fruition. That’s easy because it’s thrilling and somewhat finite. The hard part is sustaining something once the newness and the sense of accomplishment has worn off a bit. So a big focus for us this year is making sure the podcast series and the website are sustainable. The quick turnover at business schools can kill a lot of good ideas because capturing that institutional knowledge is so challenging. But we are blessed to have some really great peers at Owen right now. There’s a palpable eagerness among the student body to make Owen a better place while we’re here.

Blake: We recognize that this is a unique point in our lives. We have a lot of precious commodities right now: time, resources, administrative champions and lots and lots of smart people around us. It’s a recipe for doing some really fun stuff that’s not only personally rewarding but also reflects well upon the school.

In 2009 a team of Vanderbilt graduate and undergraduate students visiting rural Bangladesh made a startling observation. The villagers they met lacked access not only to reliable electricity but also to cheap, alternative fuel for lighting their homes. Though widely available, kerosene in Bangladesh typically costs $5 per month, or the equivalent of an average week’s salary—far too expensive to use for anything besides cooking.

This problem is not just limited to a handful of villagers the team met. There are, in fact, more than 100 million people in rural Bangladesh who are literally in the dark. Once the sun sets, countless children can no longer study or do homework, families and friends cannot interact, and all work ceases. And during the day the situation is not much better. Bangladesh is both blessed and cursed with a monsoon season, and for almost two-thirds of the year, the sun is blotted out by thick, dark storm clouds, denying these people sufficient light to live by.

The 2009 trip, which was organized by Project Pyramid, an interdisciplinary student organization that aims to alleviate world poverty, demonstrated the need for a sustainable lighting and power solution in rural Bangladesh. To tackle this issue, the organization proposed three different projects: building a biogas digester to convert animal waste into usable methane gas, creating an apparatus to turn that gas into power, and devising a product to generate more affordable lighting.

Project Pyramid presented these ideas to the School of Engineering, which, in turn, gave its fourth-year students the option of working on them as senior design projects. Each project would require a small team of engineering students led by a first-year MBA candidate. As a member of Project Pyramid, I volunteered to lead the team tasked with the affordable lighting solution. Although I hadn’t traveled to Bangladesh with the others in 2009, I was familiar with poverty in my native South Africa and knew what a positive impact a basic convenience like lighting could have on those affected. Joining me on the project were engineering students Greg Larson, Jared Robertson, Mason Hensley, Macy Skulman and Carly Jackson, all in the Class of 2010.

At the launch of the project, Clinical Professor of Management David Owens gave an insightful talk about innovation management, entreating us to consider the constraints when looking to innovate. This approach proved especially valuable for us as we highlighted two constraints that guided us throughout: (1) the product had to be affordable and meet a certain low price point, which we decided should be the $5 that was already being paid monthly for kerosene, and (2) the power source had to be sustainable and readily available to villagers and again, had to fall within our price point.

Initially we considered a number of different ways to power our product, from using the nuclear decay of radioactive materials to more traditional sources like wind and solar energy. Our list eventually narrowed to two choices: either solar or kinetic (human) power. Since Bangladesh has heavy cloud cover for most of the year, we decided a kinetic solution was best. (Although there are solar panels that can work on cloudy days, they are not affordable in this instance.) The engineers also proposed using a light-emitting diode (LED), which is energy efficient and reliable, and a modular design, which would give the user the option of changing power sources.

Our team had some clever ideas for using kinetic energy to power the lamp but settled on a foot-pedal design similar to that of manual sewing machines. The initial prototype was promising: It created a flickering light that varied as the pedal went through its arc. The catch, though, was that it needed to produce a steadier current and higher voltage to be a viable light source.

In discussing this challenge with others, including Stephen Songy, MBA’10, and Joseph Boulier, MBA’10—the two second-year MBA students heading up all the Project Pyramid teams—I soon realized our group should take a different approach. Rather than focusing on increasing the output of the foot pedal, I thought we should instead figure out a way to harness the energy it creates. In some sense we had the modular design backwards. The potential for real innovation was not in a light that could be powered by different sources; it was in a kinetic device that could power any number of rechargeable items, including lights.

Excited by this suggestion, the engineers on our team produced an updated prototype featuring a USB, instead of a proprietary, connector. At our next meeting we tested a compatible LED light, which worked fantastically. Next we plugged in an iPod and then a BlackBerry to the USB connector and charged them both using the foot pedal. After more meetings and tests, our product was finally ready for the end-of-the-year Project Pyramid showcase, where it performed as well as we had hoped and received a lot of attention from the other participants.

So, what is next for our product? Even though my teammates and I are no longer collaborating on it, the idea awaits a future group of students eager to change the world for the better. The next step will be to modify the design so that it can be easily mass-produced. It will also need to be tested in real-world conditions. And, if all goes as planned, I hope someday it will shed light, so to speak, on a problem that has plagued rural Bangladeshis for far too long.

When I first learned about the possibility of earning a sponsorship to the Vanderbilt Executive MBA program, I was intrigued. The Owen School and the Center for Nonprofit Management in Nashville had just launched an initiative offering full tuition for one nonprofit executive a year. As Vice President for Programs at Oasis Center—a nonprofit that helps Nashville youth overcome challenges such as homelessness, violence and depression—I was eligible for the sponsorship but wondered whether I’d be a better administrator with those letters following my name. I already had a graduate degree and was doing just fine, I thought. However, my wife—an MBA herself—and my boss both encouraged me to give it a shot.

I took the first step and completed the online application. I then had a follow-up interview with Tami Fassinger, Associate Dean of Executive Education at Owen. Although Tami was charming, she was not one to sugarcoat the process. I quickly realized that if I were going to make even a halfhearted attempt at this, I actually would have to study for the GMAT—something I hadn’t done since taking the GRE years before when No. 2 pencils were still used.

I started giving up my evenings and weekends to pour over The Official Guide for GMAT Review. I also attended an open house for nonprofit candidates and then ventured into the deep waters at a preview day for general candidates—people with “real” business experience. It was a little intimidating, but I left feeling confident that I could succeed at Owen. I went back to my studies, and finally the day of the test arrived. Then came the waiting.

Several weeks later I received a call from Tami saying I had been accepted to the Executive MBA program. It was a great feeling to know that I had made the cut, but for me that was not enough. I had to get the sponsorship before I could even consider attending Owen. Unlike other students I would not see large raises in my future even with an MBA, and my employer had no funds to offset the expense of my tuition. Finally in May 2007 I got another call from Tami. I had been awarded the sponsorship! I accepted, of course, and soon hit the ground running.

The first hurdle, called Math Camp, came during the middle of that summer. Designed as a refresher course for those of us who were a little rusty with basic computations, Math Camp was a sobering prelude to first semester. I started to wonder what I had committed myself to, but with the gracious support and guidance of Rita Sowell, the instructor, I made it through.

From Math Camp it was on to the Week-in-Residence at New Harmony, Ind., where I was introduced to my group—Jason Gunderson, Jarod Scott, Navin Karwande and Kenn Gindin (all EMBA’09)—four classmates who would be my lifelines, my colleagues and my friends over the next two years (and beyond). New Harmony also marked the beginning of the first semester, which placed an emphasis on quantitative coursework.

That first semester I spent night after precious night trying to bend my mind around stats, economics, finance and accounting. For someone used to offering support to others, I was unaccustomed to relying continually on the assistance of the members of my group and Isaac Rogers, BA’02, MBA’08, a gifted stats tutor. I began to wonder if I’d ever get past the first semester. And of course I did.

During the second semester I found the qualitative classes to be more in my comfort zone. I was able to offer the members of my group a little wisdom, and I felt like I was carrying my weight more than I had before. The coursework was tiring nonetheless, and by the end of two semesters, I wondered if May would ever arrive. And of course it did.

Over the summer I reconnected with my family and dug back into work. There was no Math Camp or Week-in-Residence in New Harmony to worry about. I only had to look forward to the second year, which I anticipated with much less trepidation as I knew what to expect. Just like the summer before, I wondered if fall would ever come. And of course it did.

Upon returning to Owen as a second-year student, I found myself giving advice to Mark McCaw, the new recipient of the Executive MBA/Center for Nonprofit Management sponsorship. “You will get through this,” I told him. Meanwhile I was as busy as ever. My strategy and finance classes were all-consuming, and the changing economy and a relocation for Oasis Center were making my job more demanding. At this point, though, I had my feet solidly beneath me. Somehow I had survived accounting, economics, finance and statistics, and was actually putting what I had learned to work. In my third finance class it became clear that concepts and theory were of greater importance to me, and I was able to track what we were discussing and actively participate. Had I actually learned something about finance?

This third semester was also the proving ground for my group. By this point we had formed a good team. Each member knew the others’ strengths and needs, and we respected and supported each other. We began to think ahead to our strategy project in semester four. We had moved from focusing on our classes to focusing on how we could use the total of what we had learned to accomplish a more complex goal—creating a viable strategy for a real company. At times my group and I wondered if we would get it all done. And of course we did.

During the final semester everything really came together. Each of my classes relied on what I had learned in all the others. The whole was becoming greater than the sum of its parts. The journey ended with a successful strategy presentation and the international residency, and much celebration. That final semester is still a blur.

Since receiving my diploma from Dean Bradford under the tent on Magnolia Lawn, I have had some time to think and reflect, and I have even used a few things I learned at Owen—like strategies for depreciation and maximizing human capital. Who knew this stuff was really applicable to the nonprofit world? After four semesters and some reflection, I realize I made the right decision to pursue an MBA. Up to this point I always introduced myself as the “nonprofit guy” somehow separating myself from the “real” businesspeople. Now I know I am a real businessperson. I’m just in a different kind of business.

As I look back with great pride and accomplishment, I am immensely grateful. I am grateful for my classmates who grew with me and supported my growth. I am thankful for the staff and professors who saw the potential in me. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my employer, staff and board who have all supported me and cheered me on through the past two years. And I appreciate so much the great opportunity that Owen and the Center for Nonprofit Management gave me in awarding me the sponsorship.

Lastly and most important, this journey was made all the richer because of my family. To my wife, Cecily, and my children, Michael, Harriet and Eloise, I say thank you. I appreciate so much the sacrifices you have made and the love and support you have given me over the past two years.