Meet Rochester Simon’s MBA Class of 2019

Devins Panton

Simon Business School, University of Rochester

Describe yourself in 15 words or less: I enjoy stability; I do everything in my power to avoid chaos.

Hometown: Montego Bay, Jamaica

Fun Fact About Yourself: I once made medicine for elephants in a small village in Thailand.

Undergraduate School and Major: University of the West Indies, Mona, BS in Actuarial Science

Employers and Job Titles Since Graduation:

University of California, Berkeley, Financial Analyst

Otis Spunkmeyer, Trade Promotions Analyst

Guardian Life Limited, Jamaica, Pension Administrator

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: My biggest accomplishment so far is the development of a graduate funding model at UC Berkeley to track income and expenditure of endowments totaling over $1 million. Using the model, the department was able to identify scenarios in which funds would be insufficient to cover graduate students’ salary and fees.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in the MBA program so far: My biggest accomplishment at Simon so far is completing the speaking series in my business communication course during the fall quarter. When I decided to attend Simon, the communication course stood out to me because I knew that in order to become an effective leader, I needed to improve my communication skills. To obtain this, I needed formal training coupled with consistent and deliberate practice to achieve the level of communication expertise required to become effective in the business world. The business communication course was the perfect training ground for me to achieve that.

Looking back on your experience, what is one piece of advice would you give to future business school applicants? One of the biggest pieces of advice I can give to anyone thinking about business school is to know what you DO NOT want prior to enrolling. It is so easy to lose focus and follow what everyone else is doing that you can sometimes get dragged into career paths or even classes that you have no interest in. The quicker you can figure out things or experiences that you actually want, the more authentic your business school experience will be.

What was the key factor that led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA and why was it so important to you? The Simon community is without question one of the greatest strengths of the school. The admissions team deserves high marks for their willingness to bring students from incredibly diverse backgrounds together to form a small class size. What you get is a close knit group of very motivated students who will move mountains to help each other out. The feeling I got from the people here was one of genuine interest in your success – something that was very important to me.

What would success look like to you after your first year of business school? If, after my first year, you were to interview my peers and ask for one word to describe Devins and they said “reliable,” then I would consider my first year a success.

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