Thanks to a glowing review by a WT alumni teaching at her high school, Heidi Giesbrecht wound up choosing WT. As for her Marketing major, she landed upon it by a process of elimination. Most importantly, she was wowed by our small classes, and approachable faculty.
Heidi is from Seminole Texas, an area she politely described as being flat and treeless. While it may be normal to describe the entirety of West Texas in those words, she found the WT campus to be a gorgeous woodland with its mature and well-placed trees.
By virtue of arriving with 40 dual credits already on her transcript, Heidi will be able to complete her studies in only three years, and will then start a career in media planning. She is also one of our student workers in the Dean’s Office, and the positive experience she has had here is reflected in the way she greets each person who enters the office.
“I didn’t know where I wanted to go,” she says. “So I visited a lot of places, including WT. The trees are really nice, the people are really nice, and my teacher in high school who went here described it as ‘Harvard on the Plains’.” That was good enough for her.
“Having smaller classes is really nice. You get to know your professors and everyone in your class. Plus, you don’t have to worry about some random TA grading your paper, she adds.
Heidi did not know until this semester what she wanted to do with her career. In her quest to become a media planner, she is honing her skills in the details side of it, which includes which media to buy, how much, and when. It is a critical task for anyone in Marketing, made more complicated in recent years with all of the digital platform options.
And as for her geographic preferences after graduation, she is unabashed. “I don’t really care. I just don’t want to go back to Seminole.”
Attesting to the rigor of her major, Heidi notes “There is a lot more writing than I expected!” Group projects and essay exams may be the bane of many students’ existence, but Heidi quickly adapted and has excelled, learning how to explain why she thinks a certain way.
She also recognized the implicit objective of teamwork in nearly every course, harking back to her Principles of Marketing course in which her team pitched a new product, complete with SWOT analysis and the usual 4Ps. “Picking the right teammates is critical,” she attests.
Her choice of Marketing as a major was based on the process of elimination. “I went to a college fair while in high school, and some recruiter told me to grab a pamphlet of all the majors, and then cross off the ones you don’t want to do. I was left with Marketing, International Business, and Math.” She quickly dismissed the idea of being a Math teacher, and then opted to give Marketing a try. “I could always switch my major,” she laughs, although it is probably a little late for that now.
The 2025 Study Abroad trip to Denmark, Sweden, and Germany has caught Heidi’s eye, and she wants to learn about how those cultures do business. It is her desire to learn that has made her journey in the Engler College of Business a positive one.