Frank Jimmy

When Frank Jimmy, MMA '24 Candidate, was contemplating the next stage in his career, he found potential employers were looking for a mix of management and quantitative skills. And while he’d amassed a variety of experiences through the many projects he’d worked on in the past, Frank felt that formalizing some of those learnings and developing even stronger leadership skills would be crucial to his career development.

“I wanted to be more digitally and financially literate, to learn everything at a high level and understand what opportunities were out there in fields that I’d never even heard about,” says Frank, a Logistics Project Engineering Specialist at General Dynamics Land Systems.

“This program for me was almost like a funnel to help me figure out what to zone in on.”

He initially looked at the Ivey MMA program in 2021, while working for General Dynamics in London, and hoping to learn about new ways to use data to improve decision making.

At the time, he hesitated. After a few years working abroad and needing to settle back down in London post-pandemic, the timing didn’t feel right.

“I also felt like I was older than everyone else joining the cohort,” he says. “But Ivey had several meet-and-greet opportunities, and I was able to have conversations with the program’s associate director, who persuaded me to take my shot.”

Now that he’s in the MMA, Frank says he’s finding new ways to grow every day, and tackling challenges with the help of his professors, Ivey staff, and his fellow students.

“There’s a great sense of accomplishment from taking on challenging cases, interacting in the classroom, and learning from professors you feel truly care about your learning,” Frank says.

“The learning teams have been put together so well; we’ve formed such strong relationships. I feel like I'm constantly pushing myself and learning, but within a community, so there's support, and there's always friends you can call on to help you out.”

But for Frank, the best part of the program has been finding ways to apply what he’s learned at Ivey to his workplace.

“I was able to use a Process Flow Diagram to explain complicated decisions to customers, and that’s an example of a tool that directly helped to manage the expectations of a customer – who appreciated the way we explained what we could realistically deliver and why,” he says.

“The fun part of all of this has been the exposure to new tools, the guidance that came with the courses, and the ability to see the connections at my workplace and then taking back ideas we can talk about.

I feel like I’m a different person in my organization now: I'm able to speak differently, I'm able to think differently. There’s new value I bring.”