Written for University of Oregon's Master of Business Administration application.

Please explain how the Oregon MBA program and your preferred program tracks will build on your experiences to date and will further your career goals. Tell us not only what you hope to gain from the Oregon MBA program but also what will you bring to the program and our learning community.

Prior to beginning my career at the University of Oregon as a Master of Architecture candidate, I spent four years entrenched in the world of sales and marketing in the home textile industry. The firms where I was employed designed products for large U.S. retailers, sourcing raw materials and production primarily through India, China, and Pakistan. This experience brought the realities of the inefficient global supply chain model into my daily life. The system relies on lowest first cost as the primary sales driver, delivering low quality merchandise where the true cost of products, both cultural and environmental, is hidden from the consumer. As a sales and marketing professional, I quickly became dissatisfied with my inability to effect any positive change within this system.

For the past two years as an architecture student, I have focused on learning the critical thinking and visual communication skills crucial to generating meaningful solutions to both well and ill-defined problems. These skills serve my long-term goal of becoming a principal in a design firm that contributes significantly to the local and global communities by developing contextually sensitive work. I am pursuing a Master of Business Administration to develop the skills necessary to manifest these design projects as practical solutions that do not rely on an unrealistic utopian vision, but strive toward a feasible, ecologically sensitive future.

Design professionals are taught that an integrated design approach is the only way to achieve these objectives. But, as professions increase in specialization, segmentation of the fields becomes an impediment to this end. This segmentation underlines the necessity for thoughtful interdisciplinary work. Clarence Stein, an early 20th Century urban planner and architect, stated, “an individual's growth toward excellence comes from furthering the unlike excellence of others." Effective leaders must be proficient in the languages of multiple disciplines and capable of relating to disparate personalities. Through my past professional experiences as a software developer within both clinical and laboratory settings in healthcare, as a sales and marketing professional within the global retail sourcing marketplace, and as a Graduate Teaching Fellow within the university environment, I have learned to successfully operate using the languages of multiple disciplines. This is an essential executive skill, which I intend to encourage colleagues to foster within themselves.

Beyond the individual and beyond any profession, our society needs to make significant changes across all areas of human activity in order to secure a prosperous future. Considering the cultural climate in the U.S., which led to globalization, domestic businesses must play a significant stewardship role in developing ecologically sensitive solutions, if we are to overcome the many challenges we face. The only avenue for success is one that seeks to work with, and within, the existing infrastructure. An education in the Center for Sustainable Business Practices will provide me with a solid foundation to continue my career in this vein. The designer must learn to embrace liability and a business-centric focus in order to become an effective advocate for change.