This month, we sat down with Tiffany Huang, a recent Georgetown graduate who leveraged her MBA to pivot into product marketing at LinkedIn. Tiffany guides us through her journey from media consulting to McDonough School of Business, where she developed the network and skillset she needed to position herself for the job of her dreams.
Tell us a little about you!
My name is Tiffany Huang and I graduated from NYU in 2013 with a degree in media, culture and communications. After college, I pursued a career in media before transitioning to consulting at Capgemini, where I would drive North American social media and digital marketing agendas across business units and a variety of sectors. After three years, I decided I wanted to pivot into tech and thought that an MBA would enable me to perform this transition. Today, I am a product marketing manager at LinkedIn, where I connect with customers in an effort to deliver products they need and will fall in love with.
Why did you apply to InSITE Fellows?
I was first told about InSITE through a webinar before starting my MBA at Georgetown. Jeff Reid, the executive director of Georgetown’s Entrepreneurship initiative, was a panelist on the webinar and he told everyone about this thing called InSITE. The program was so appealing to me because it combined my background in consulting with my passion for startups – that’s what hooked me! Everything I was doing before school was very entrepreneurial and InSITE would give me the opportunity to learn a ton of new skills, obtain hands on experience outside the classroom, and develop the network I wanted to advance my career.
What projects did you work on through InSITE?
One of the reasons I loved InSITE is because it provided me the ability to obtain hands on experience working closely with some of DC’s hottest, young startups. One semester, I helped Commonwealth Joe Coffee Roasters perform market research to establish a national expansion plan. We performed a TAM analysis that would help Commonwealth Joe identify the top five cities to enter next. The team was awesome to work with and we learned a ton about the coffee industry, including everything from suppliers, to distribution, to consumer insights. Nowadays, I perform a ton of market research at LinkedIn and this experience at taught me everything I needed to know to position myself for a product marketing role.
What was your favorite InSITE memory?
Each spring, InSITE offers its members an opportunity to travel to SXSW, one of the nation’s largest music and tech festivals, to explore topics in tech, entrepreneurship, and venture investing. Fellows from across chapters travel from all over the country to live together for a week and explore everything Austin, Texas has to offer from startups to food to culture. While our classmates are in the Caribbean, we’re meeting Mark Cuban and the cast from Game of Thrones. Couldn’t have been a better experience! On top of that, I ended up meeting another fellow who was interning at Linkedin and now we work together so how cool is that?!
What is one lesson you learned from InSITE?
You develop a lot of soft skills, such as not being afraid of change. One semester, the founder I was working with wanted to change the project we were working on, like a 180-degree transformation, because the business was pivoting to adapt to a change in the marketplace. You have to learn to grow comfortable with change and stop fearing failure because that’s all just part of doing business.
If you could provide one piece of advice to an incoming MBA student, what would it be?
Pick one or two things you really want to do and focus on it. It is really easy to get lost at business school. There are so many great people and so many great opportunities. You’ll lose your mind trying to do a million things at once, so figure out what you want to do, focus, and just do it!