As a member of the Purdue University men’s basketball team, Travis Carroll was developing life-long skills of discipline, teamwork, and motivation that would benefit him in the future. After graduating with a Bachelor of Science in Organizational Leadership and Supervision, he continued his passion for basketball by taking on an assistant coaching position with the University of Indianapolis.
Athletes are competitive by nature, and Carroll found this to be the case when it came to his career. He realized during his time at the University of Indianapolis he wanted more out of his career and had an urge to convert to a business role which ultimately took him to Lids in Zionsville, IN. Wanting to perform at his best and be a competitive candidate later on in his career, Carroll knew he’d need more business education.
“If you want to gain an edge on your competition, you have to do things differently that might not be as fun but would benefit [you] in the long-run.” This ultimately launched his pursuit of an MBA program.
With his background in team sports, Carroll naturally gravitated towards Krannert's team-oriented approach to learning.
"One of the really cool aspects of the Weekend MBA program was the team aspect,” mentioned Carroll. “We had engineers, sales reps, all from different backgrounds of the world ... you really had a lot of unique backgrounds, unique cultures that you can talk to and get a wide breadth of knowledge and next steps.”
Near the completion of his Weekend MBA, Carroll accepted an offer as a business development representative for Conga in Indianapolis, IN. In this role, he garners new business using analytics and communicates how their document generation and contract management solutions can help businesses in their day-to-day tasks as well as saving time and money.
In this new role, Carroll found he was able to take lessons he learned during his Saturday classes and apply them at his job on Monday.
“I was able to better manipulate data to make better reports and then bring that back to my job to help the company and my boss view our data differently and influence decisions,” said Carroll.
The small steps that Carroll took from basketball to business, to pursuing his MBA, lead to him landing an exceptional job.