Meet UCLA Anderson’s MBA Class Of 2021

CAREER SERVICES SETS THE PACE

Indeed, the Parker Center may be the school’s biggest asset. In the most recent student and alumni surveys conducted by The Economist and The Financial Times, Parker ranked 2nd and 4th respectively…worldwide. Over the years, the Parker staff have been feted for their accessibility and expertise. More than that, it is a center that goes the extra mile. Along with intensive monitoring and coaching from acceptance to graduation, the Parker team maintains close partnerships with employers and faculty alike. By sharing emerging trends and best practices with both, the Parker Center keeps UCLA students and career development top of mind. The Class of 2021 is already reaping the benefits.

“The Parker Career Center was a key factor for me in choosing UCLA Anderson,” Jordan Barillas admits. “At the end of the day, the MBA program sets us up for a long and successful career, and nothing has done that more powerfully than my weekly meetings with my Parker career advisor, my Parker career classes, and the recent alumni and classmates who want me to succeed.”

“The amazing Parker staff are incredibly knowledgeable and dedicated to helping you personalize your career path—you are not just some cookie-cutter outcome,” adds Caroline Ward.

LANDING AN INTERNSHIP…BEFORE CLASSES EVEN START

That’s a big deal in an area like Los Angeles, joking referred to as “72 suburbs in search of a city.” It is a city with an annual GDP over a trillion dollars – second only to New York City. Los Angeles is also the center of the acclaimed Silicon Beach – a hodgepodge of tech startups and incumbents centered in Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey, El Segundo, and Culver City. It was a birthplace of Snap, a company with an estimated worth of $30 billion dollars during its IPO in 2017. The area has also nurtured billion-dollar firms like Hulu, Bitium, Dollar Shave Club, and TrueCar – not to mention household names like Zip Recruiter, Riot Games, The Honest Company, and Legal Zoom. Collectively, Silicon Beach startups are estimated to be worth over $150 billion dollars. That doesn’t count the deep presence of heavy-hitters like Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon. Even firms like Nike are setting down roots in the area.

Not surprisingly, nearly a third of UCLA Anderson MBAs enter tech. That held great appeal to Maura Liebendorfer, a Deloitte consultant who hopes to launch or lead a tech startup. “Anderson was a natural frontrunner with its incredible tech resources and recruiting pipeline and its proximity to the myriad startups of Silicon Beach. I knew I would have no shortage of opportunities here to engage with the major players in tech and build the skills and industry knowledge I need to be achieve my recruiting goals. Since I arrived, these expectations have been more than exceeded.”

There are more testimonials like that in the Class of 2021. This fall, Michael Vilardo landed a digital product management internship at Nike thanks to Anderson’s curriculum, alumni, and (of course) the Parker Center. Kaylan Young snapped up her internship even earlier than that.

“The Parker Career Center is amazing at helping us prepare for and land jobs and internships. I was able to secure my internship before even beginning school thanks to the prep work that they laid out for us as part of our Consortium Orientation Program.

A RISING ENTREPRENEURSHIP POWER

Being squarely between Silicon Beach and Hollywood doesn’t hurt UCLA Anderson’s cause, either. As tech, media, and creative deepen their synergies, UCLA Anderson is perfectly positioned to help students enter their dream careers. That is particularly true for Austin Josiah, who brings a passion for media, sports, and entertainment to Westwood.

“I wanted to be in a large city with myriad opportunities to network, meet with local sports and entertainment companies, and be around a critical mass of students who are also pursuing a similar career path. What better place to do this than in the City of Angels where beyond the ten professional sports teams, there are agencies, media companies, sports start-ups, etc. that you could have the opportunity to intern with during the academic school year? Also, with the power of UCLA Anderson’s Center for Management of Enterprise in Media, Entertainment, and Sports [MEMES], there are alumni connections, industry conferences, and sports-related courses where you can really delve deep into the industry vertical and develop the relationships necessary to help launch your career.”

The tech and entertainment industries draw talent – and create opportunities for middle-market support and game-changing disruptors to take root. Such forces spur entrepreneurship…and UCLA Anderson is taking full advantage of this environment. In 2019, UCLA Anderson ranked 9th in P&Q’s inaugural MBA entrepreneurship ranking – with UCLA alumni giving their alma mater the 5th-highest scores in entrepreneurship in the 2019 Bloomberg Businessweek survey. Max Berg, a 2019 grad who co-founded a company that markets personalized craft beers as an MBA student, is quick to credit both the programming and the Anderson community at large for his success.

UCLA Anderson’s Business Creation Opportunity (BCO) capstone program was instrumental in our ability to build Eliqs,” he told P&Q last fall. “The program provided us with a risk-free playground to conduct extensive research, develop our business model, test our hypotheses, connect with investors, and interface with incredibly knowledgeable mentors and experts in the space. The broader Anderson community’s values of “share success” also helped us make strides as countless club and school events served as our initial base of customers who provided valuable feedback that we’ve used to optimize our model and operational structure every step of the way.”

SAYING ‘YES’ TO WHAT IS AHEAD

After product management, Michael Vilardo is considering running his own company. That’s one reason why he joined Anderson’s Entrepreneur Association. “For both my entrepreneurial and product management dreams, having the ability to successfully think innovatively and achieve buy-in from both internal and external stakeholders continues to become more and more important in today’s economic landscape. Learning how to successfully articulate my own ideas and constructively take criticism to better myself is the epitome of entrepreneurship, and this excites me about being around other like-minded and motivated individuals.”

Just don’t expect the Class of 2021 to spend their two years at the beach (even if it is just a bike ride away according to Austin Josiah). After all, this is the class that raises their hands and says “yes” in unison. Instead, they plan to spend their MBA years preparing to fulfill their purpose.

For Ariana Cernius, that translates to using real estate to better serve marginalized populations. “Hopefully I’ll have made significant progress on developing a scalable model for one slice of the “invisibly disabled” population that can be replicated by other families and developers from state-to-state.”

Caroline Ward’s mission is to channel investment into building innovative businesses…and champion women in the workplace. At the same time, Austin Josiah plans to create an investment firm that channels athlete wealth to sustainable startups – to persuade others to say ‘Yes’ to something more profound that touches more people.

“College and professional athletes have historically been taken advantage of and don’t always utilize their brands and their money to invest in long term sustainable ventures that better themselves or their communities. Because of the power of social media and the shifts in legislation for the NCAA and other sports governing bodies, there are tremendous opportunities to capitalize on their athletic prowess and use it for self-empowerment. I hope to be at the forefront of this movement and be the intermediary between top athletes and sustainable business investments. I wholeheartedly believe UCLA Anderson can help me achieve this goal.”

What led these professionals to enter business schools? Which programs did they also consider? What strategies did they use to choose their MBA program? What was the major event that defined them? Find the answers to these questions and many more in the in-depth profiles of these incoming MBA candidates.

MBA Student	Hometown	Undergrad Alma Mater	Last Employer
Jordan Barillas	Albuquerque, NM	University of Pennsylvania	RBC Capital Markets
Ariana Cernius	Newport Beach, CA	Harvard College	Bet Tzedek Legal Services
Cindy Gao	Shandong, China	The Chinese University of Hong Kong	ICBC International
Jessica Hodgson	London, UK	Loughborough University	Cazenove Capital
Austin Josiah	Orlando, FL	University of Pennsylvania	Morgan Stanley
Karan Khurana	Bathinda, India	Panjab University	OLA (ANI Technologies Pvt. Ltd.)
Maura Liebendorfer	Newton, MA	University of Virginia	Deloitte Consulting
Jacob Markus	Thousand Oaks, CA	University of California, Berkeley	Facebook
Kalyn Saulsberry	Saint Louis, MO	Harvard University	COPE Health Solutions
Michael Vilardo	Cary, IL	University of Pennsylvania	Uber Technologies
Caroline Ward	Edina, MN	Claremont McKenna College	The Travelers Companies
Kaylan Young	Katy, TX	Howard University	AkzoNobel