Kendall Boyd ’17

I thought I wanted to work in state government, but I did a big pivot when I got to Yale SOM, and the core curriculum sort of flung open the doors of the business world. I went to meetings and guest speaker events. I joined every club.

I ended up discussing the whole thing with a second-year classmate. He kept questioning what I’m really passionate about. He asked what I do first thing when I wake up in the morning, and I told him I reach for my phone and look at the sports scores. That was my turning point.

I researched opportunities at every single sports league, sports foundation, and sports media outlet, from Nike to the Women’s Sports Foundation to the NFL and NBC Sports. Looking for an internship, I reached out to every Yale SOM alum in sports. If you’re going into something niche, there’s somebody from SOM who’s already in it, and what’s even better is that they’re excited to talk to you.

One elective course I’m taking focuses on internal technologies and how to best utilize them in your organization. One of the big things in sports now, especially at the team level, is customer relationship management technology. A lot of places have historically used these technologies for business development, but now they’re asking, “Hey, what about if we use this for ticket sales? How do we manage all the different people who buy tickets, whether they’re season ticket holders, whether they bought an individual ticket, whether they came in through group tickets? How do we track people and then track information about them, so that we can better target and leverage our advertising?” I want to understand the technology that can make this happen.

I’m co-captain of the SOM Hockey Club. It’s a very large club. It’s really helped shape me from a managerial perspective. We have students who have never skated before, and we’ve got students who’ve played hockey all their lives and are really awesome. How do you get these groups to buy into a single team? At Yale SOM, we all play together, all the time—we don’t separate out players according to skill level and gender. As a co-captain here, I’m working with everyone.
 

Read a blog post by Kendall Boyd on her summer internship at the Ladies Professional Golf Association.