When Tom Ascheim ’90 first arrived at Yale SOM, he wasn’t quite sure what he would do with his management degree. Newly married, with a few years of work in film financing under his belt, Ascheim was driven by a sense that “it was time to grow up,” he told Patrick Cressler ’25 in an episode of the Career Conversations podcast earlier this year.
“I didn’t know whether I wanted to be in business, government, or nonprofits,” he recalled. “Yale felt like the right place to let me hedge my bets a little bit.”
Ultimately, Ascheim’s SOM experience allowed him to transform a nascent interest in the entertainment industry into a decades-long career. A summer internship at MTV Networks landed him a post-SOM job at Nickelodeon, then a relatively young channel working to find its place in the children’s media landscape. At Nickelodeon, Ascheim learned to combine rigorous research and instinct to create and finance programming that resonates with viewers.
“That lesson stayed with me forever,” he said. “Your brand position has to make sense on a gut, organic level. It has to inform your product and your brand and the way that you actually go about organizing the people with whom you work.”
Ascheim’s post-Nickelodeon career included stints at major media companies such as Sesame Workshop, Warner Bros., and ABC Family, which he guided through its transformation to Freeform. Most recently, he co-founded his own entertainment consulting firm, Pith & Pixie Dust.
While entertainment is often less glamorous than it looks from the outside, Ascheim said, he enjoys being part of an industry that directly touches most people’s everyday experiences.
“If you go to a dinner party, people have a lot of opinions,” he said. “They hate some of the shows you’ve made, and they like other ones, and they want to know why such-and-such got canceled.”
Looking back, Ascheim credited SOM with instilling the skills necessary to thrive in a competitive and ever-evolving field.
“What we believed at the time, and what I believe today, is that it has to be about more than making money,” he said. “Making money is not the substance of what you do; the substance is your contribution to the people with whom you work and the people you serve.”
On the Career Conversations podcast, Yale SOM students sit down with alumni for a series of candid conversations about career paths, industries, opportunities for business school graduates, and discussions on career topics including work-life balance and creating a meaningful impact in business and society. Listen and subscribe.
