Posted 9:22 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 1, 2014
UW-L Alum Meagan Kempen, ’06, didn’t follow a dotted line to success. But she says the unpredictable path she chose – taking her from New York City, to Los Angeles, then Chicago and finally to Minneapolis — was one of self-discovery and zero regrets.
[caption id="attachment_4562" align="alignright" width="350"]
UW-L Alum Meagan Kempen, ’06[/caption]
UW-L Alum Meagan Kempen, ’06, didn’t follow a dotted line to success. But she says the unpredictable path she chose – taking her from New York City, to Los Angeles, then Chicago and finally to Minneapolis — was one of self-discovery and zero regrets.
Kempen will give the keynote address at the UW-L College of Business Administration Take an Eagle to Lunch event at 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 9, at the Cleary Alumni & Friends Center Great Hall. The event is sponsored by The Silver Eagles CBA alumni group.
Kempen was a UW-L marketing major and English minor who set her sights on a career in publishing. So, before her senior year, she moved to Park Avenue in New York City to intern for a luxury fashion magazine — and soon realized that the career so often romanticized by Hollywood was anything but.
As the assistant to the magazine’s publisher, Kempen describes her daily routine as a scene from the movie “The Devil Wears Prada.” Armed with a credit card and a driver, she ran out to get her boss coffees and lunches, attended luncheons and awards shows, and shopped the city for everything from summer camp supplies for her boss’s son to baby presents for celebrities. But while she was given perks such as invites to swanky parties in the Hamptons, reservations to art openings with Lindsay Lohan and her boss’s Porsche for a week, it didn’t seem to matter. Kempen’s “dream career” wasn’t fulfilling.
“I was having fun, but I was not inspired at all,” says Kempen. “I didn’t feel challenged. I simply felt busy.”
[caption id="attachment_4563" align="alignright" width="230"]
Meagan Kempen[/caption]
So, she decided to make a change. When she graduated from UW-L, Kempen made a 180 from her glamorous internship — and moved to Los Angeles for a role as a quantitative researcher at a brand consultancy.
“I basically realized that it was the really nerdy work that I liked best,” Kempen said. “I loved being given some company’s ‘big problem’ and being asked to go find the solution. It was as though I was in the middle of one of Steve Brokaw’s Harvard Business Review case studies,” she laughed reflecting on her former marketing professor’s class.
Over the next four years, Kempen worked in both quantitative and qualitative research with the same team, “solving problems” for Fortune 500 companies such as Target, Microsoft, Comcast, Taco Bell, Kraft, Sony and many others. One example of her work involved helping Method launch their first laundry detergent. Kempen traveled across the U.S. and Canada, doing “laundry-along” ethnographies with consumers in their homes to learn about their habits. Kempen’s team observed that most people use way too much detergent based on the common mindset that “if this line is enough, more is better.” However, that’s not true of the way detergent works. Subsequently, Kempen’s team developed the new Method detergent bottle with a pump and a label that instructs users to save money and the environment by not over-pouring.
Kempen’s years working with these companies and their advertising agencies eventually led her into a role as an ad agency strategist, and a welcome move closer to home in Minneapolis. She worked at ad agencies Olson and Fallon in Minneapolis, before making a move in March of this year to finally “be the client” in her current role in new product innovation at 3M.
“All the time I was doing research and working in advertising, I was so excited to find the answers for these companies and set their brand strategies, but I never got to really see the project through,” Kempen said. “I had to pass the ball back to the client to make the decisions. My new role is perfect in that I’m the person hiring the researchers and agencies as we come up with new product ideas under the Nexcare™ brand umbrella. Having done those jobs before, I really love it.”
Today, she’s a far distance from that office on Park Avenue, both physically and mentally, and she says she has UW-L to thank for it. Kempen was Editor-in-Chief of The Racquet, and said that it was during this role that she recognized she did her best work when she used a combination of “curiosity and hard work.”
“I’m motivated by solving problems,” she says. “I love finding the solution for an unmet need. And even though my parents probably wondered when I was finally going to settle down, I’m really grateful that I kept an open mind and wasn’t afraid to move around and find what I really loved. And in my experience, employers are looking for this mindset more and more – it’s becoming less about getting the cookie-cutter pedigree and more about the resourceful self-starter who just rolls up their sleeves and figures it out.”
“I have zero regrets,” she finished. “My advice to the students will be to take some risks, keep an open mind and to find what really makes them happy. I’m certainly glad that I did.”
UW-L Alum Meagan Kempen, ’06[/caption]
UW-L Alum Meagan Kempen, ’06, didn’t follow a dotted line to success. But she says the unpredictable path she chose – taking her from New York City, to Los Angeles, then Chicago and finally to Minneapolis — was one of self-discovery and zero regrets.
Kempen will give the keynote address at the UW-L College of Business Administration Take an Eagle to Lunch event at 11 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 9, at the Cleary Alumni & Friends Center Great Hall. The event is sponsored by The Silver Eagles CBA alumni group.
Kempen was a UW-L marketing major and English minor who set her sights on a career in publishing. So, before her senior year, she moved to Park Avenue in New York City to intern for a luxury fashion magazine — and soon realized that the career so often romanticized by Hollywood was anything but.
As the assistant to the magazine’s publisher, Kempen describes her daily routine as a scene from the movie “The Devil Wears Prada.” Armed with a credit card and a driver, she ran out to get her boss coffees and lunches, attended luncheons and awards shows, and shopped the city for everything from summer camp supplies for her boss’s son to baby presents for celebrities. But while she was given perks such as invites to swanky parties in the Hamptons, reservations to art openings with Lindsay Lohan and her boss’s Porsche for a week, it didn’t seem to matter. Kempen’s “dream career” wasn’t fulfilling.
“I was having fun, but I was not inspired at all,” says Kempen. “I didn’t feel challenged. I simply felt busy.”
[caption id="attachment_4563" align="alignright" width="230"] Meagan Kempen[/caption]
So, she decided to make a change. When she graduated from UW-L, Kempen made a 180 from her glamorous internship — and moved to Los Angeles for a role as a quantitative researcher at a brand consultancy.
“I basically realized that it was the really nerdy work that I liked best,” Kempen said. “I loved being given some company’s ‘big problem’ and being asked to go find the solution. It was as though I was in the middle of one of Steve Brokaw’s Harvard Business Review case studies,” she laughed reflecting on her former marketing professor’s class.
Over the next four years, Kempen worked in both quantitative and qualitative research with the same team, “solving problems” for Fortune 500 companies such as Target, Microsoft, Comcast, Taco Bell, Kraft, Sony and many others. One example of her work involved helping Method launch their first laundry detergent. Kempen traveled across the U.S. and Canada, doing “laundry-along” ethnographies with consumers in their homes to learn about their habits. Kempen’s team observed that most people use way too much detergent based on the common mindset that “if this line is enough, more is better.” However, that’s not true of the way detergent works. Subsequently, Kempen’s team developed the new Method detergent bottle with a pump and a label that instructs users to save money and the environment by not over-pouring.
Kempen’s years working with these companies and their advertising agencies eventually led her into a role as an ad agency strategist, and a welcome move closer to home in Minneapolis. She worked at ad agencies Olson and Fallon in Minneapolis, before making a move in March of this year to finally “be the client” in her current role in new product innovation at 3M.
“All the time I was doing research and working in advertising, I was so excited to find the answers for these companies and set their brand strategies, but I never got to really see the project through,” Kempen said. “I had to pass the ball back to the client to make the decisions. My new role is perfect in that I’m the person hiring the researchers and agencies as we come up with new product ideas under the Nexcare™ brand umbrella. Having done those jobs before, I really love it.”
Today, she’s a far distance from that office on Park Avenue, both physically and mentally, and she says she has UW-L to thank for it. Kempen was Editor-in-Chief of The Racquet, and said that it was during this role that she recognized she did her best work when she used a combination of “curiosity and hard work.”
“I’m motivated by solving problems,” she says. “I love finding the solution for an unmet need. And even though my parents probably wondered when I was finally going to settle down, I’m really grateful that I kept an open mind and wasn’t afraid to move around and find what I really loved. And in my experience, employers are looking for this mindset more and more – it’s becoming less about getting the cookie-cutter pedigree and more about the resourceful self-starter who just rolls up their sleeves and figures it out.”
“I have zero regrets,” she finished. “My advice to the students will be to take some risks, keep an open mind and to find what really makes them happy. I’m certainly glad that I did.”
How do I contribute to Silver Eagles scholarships?
"Take an Eagle to Lunch" is sponsored by the Silver Eagles. They are a group of College of Business Administration graduates who provide scholarships, along with networking and other opportunities to CBA students as they prepare for business careers. To make a gift to the Silver Eagles Scholarship Fund, visit the UW-L Foundation website, click on “Give Now”, designate the College of Business Administration and note Silver Eagles 2014. Or contact Jeff Meyer, UW-L senior development officer, at jmeyer@uwlax.edu or 608.785.8502. Since 2000, the Silver Eagles have awarded 20 scholarships to students totaling $20,000. All funds raised from Take an Eagle to Lunch are applied to the scholarship endowment. “The cost of education is increasingly becoming a burden for students. We know we benefit from having a university and students to help grow our state economy,” says Marlin Helgeson, chair of the Silver Eagles Take an Eagle to Lunch committee and a member of the Silver Eagles. “We need scholarships to attract and retain the brightest students.” Meagan Kempen received several scholarships while attending UW-L:- Two Autie Curry Sanford Scholarships, $1,000
- Wisconsin Cranberry Scholarship, $1,250
- The Greater Milwaukee Foundation Jay Walter & Clara Damm Scholarship, $500.