Libby Gilbert was a varsity swimmer for four years at Ohio State. Because the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted one season, she and other NCAA athletes received an extra year of competitive eligibility even after she had completed her undergraduate degree. Libby decided to take advantage of the opportunity to join the swim team at Vanderbilt—and to join the MMark program.

“I wanted to get the highest level of education I could at a great university that I knew would set me up for my future,” says the California native.  

For someone who majored in political science and once envisioned law school in her future, it might have seemed intimidating to enter the relatively unfamiliar world of a graduate business school—even more so, considering that she was balancing the academic challenge with the demands of Division I athletics. The close, supportive environment she found at Owen put her at ease.

“The community at Vanderbilt has meant everything to me,” Libby says. “The class environment was unlike any other experience I had in my education. I genuinely loved going to class every day because it meant I got to hang out with all of my friends. We were able to put a lot of time and effort into each other in the class. All the professors are so dedicated to our success and our growth that it made it a warm and healthy place to learn”—a feature that Libby says made her more confident in asking what she had imagined might be “dumb questions” in classes like statistics.

Even during the program’s initial weeks, the class experience gave Libby more confidence. “For Kelly Goldsmith’s Advanced Marketing Management class,” she says, “my group and I worked on an AI extension of the dating app Tinder. The project was very thorough and complex, with each person in our group having different skill sets that we played to. Considering it was the beginning of the school year, I was impressed by our group’s ability to create a real product that could be launched with only a few minor adjustments. It showed our strengths at an early stage, and we only grew from there.”