Alum
Aryelle Lawrence
SVP, Sales Communications and Client Brand Experience, The Walt Disney Company
Aryelle Lawrence, BA'04
“I think that I felt more comfortable and confident in public speaking. I definitely took a few courses that forced me at the time to present my ideas, but also to present other people's ideas.
I recall a time where I actually had to deliver a speech of another student in the class, which was so uncomfortable for me at the time, and I think that it really broke me out of my shell.
There were a lot of opportunities to not only learn, but to collaborate and push myself outside of the normal boundaries, whether I was learning about media or advertising telecommunications at the time, or just being more confident in my ability to be a good student. I would say those are some of the things that I felt like it offered me.
Not only did IU create an incredible foundation for me, from an education standpoint, it put me in such a well poised position for the world that came after school and just being confident in my ability to deliver and present with the foundational skills that I needed.
But also, as part of the sorority [Alpha Phi], I'm still best friends with so many of my college friends. We don't all live in the same place, but we still keep in touch and participate in each other's life events. And then I met my husband here, so it's kind of a full circle moment back here, because it did give me so much. The education, but also a foundation.
I think that I wouldn't be who I am today without the foundation that IU gave me, and I think that part of that is being a good student and learning the critical skills to be a good student, how to advocate for yourself, and how to navigate learning the first time away from home. Being in a lot of the communication and telecommunication classes that I was in really gave me some of those critical skills that I mentioned: how to be a good student, how to understand the media landscape, how to get up and present ideas in front of hundreds of people, and then eventually smaller subsets of that.
All of those things are so important when you leave here, and without the confidence and that knowledge and those critical skills, I wouldn't have been able to step into an entry level role with all these senior people, without the foundation and the backbone that the school provided.
Advice that I would offer anyone before even talking about this field or what I do is, one, always be curious, and, two, always say yes. And what I mean by that is sometimes when you leave here, you might be super prepared to know precisely what you want to do. Other times, you might not.
But the best advice that I can give is, if you say yes, it will open doors, and if you say yes, it'll allow you seats at tables that you might not have otherwise. Or if you say yes, it'll give you access to something that might not be exactly what you thought you wanted, but it might lead you to the thing that you wanted, or it might change your opinion and actually guide you somewhere on a journey that you never planned for.
I think being open minded and being a leader versus a follower has so much opportunity to offer.”
Written By Lily Saylor
Photos By Emma Ramirez