Doria Nathanson

When it comes to business school, Doria Nathanson admits she’s unorthodox. As a BU undergrad, Doria attended the College of Fine Arts, graduated with her BFA, and spent five years in the industry taking on graphic design and marketing projects. “I started as a corporate graphic designer and then started taking on more and more responsibilities,” she says. This atypical background was why she knew she needed to make Questrom her next move.

Doria chose the Professional Evening MBA program at Questrom because she wanted to align her existing design knowledge with a business framework. Her strengths lie not only in graphic design, but also in strategy, digital marketing, and implementing sales tools to help with marketing efforts. But she was eager to do more. “That’s the theme of why I’m here; it’s bridging the gap between those two skill sets,” she says. “One of the biggest drivers for me was to arm myself with some of those tools that I would need to justify some of our marketing decisions.”

Since the PEMBA program allows for students to tailor their degree to their interests, Doria was able to continue pursuing her passion for marketing while working full time. “I’ve taken advantage of the freedom to start slow, rev up, and slow down again when I need to,” she says.

But being enrolled in a part-time program doesn’t mean she’s involved any less than full-time students. At Questrom, she has access to all the same resources as the full-time students, including student clubs. “The student council opened me up to the entire Questrom student community,” she says of her experience as the associate PEMBA representative on the Questrom School of Business Graduate Student Council. “It created a very dynamic student experience.” Being in that role really helped her to get that much more out of the program, she says. “I’m a self-proclaimed introvert…but things like that take you out of your comfort zone. If you’re getting your MBA, you need to get out of your comfort zone to make the most out of it.”

Doria also finds herself building up her confidence, which allows her to work better in her full-time position as a Corporate Marketing Manager at Sheehan Family Companies. She didn’t just join the marketing team—she became the marketing team.

“When I became the marketing department,” she explains, “I was missing some of the quantitative skills.” Working in the space of corporate sales and marketing, this graphic designer-turned-marketer oversees nineteen other sub companies across and within the company itself. And the PEMBA program helped her believe in herself enough to excel.

“It makes me confident on a day to day basis. I know that intuitively a lot of the things I’m learning now I sort of already felt and maybe wasn’t as able to verbalize why—like why certain things work or why we should make specific decisions about a project. Now, I have this toolkit that I can reference. Having that has really made me confident in my decisions in my current role as a manager and as a consultant in all of our companies across the country, and that’s been invaluable to me.”

”I’ve taken advantage of the freedom to start slow, rev up, and slow down again when I need to.”

– Doria Nathanson