The Aha Moment For Business Majors

Abby Huber, a student at Mendoza School of Business

Abby Huber, a student at Mendoza School of Business

Abby Huber, Mendoza School of Business

Abby Huber is a rising senior at the Mendoza School of Business, but didn’t intend to be there when she arrived at the University of Notre Dame. In fact, she describes her background as almost anti-business.

“Both of my parents are doctors. My mom is in internal medicine and my dad’s a surgeon. So I grew up in a very medical family, and the expectation was that I was going to be a doctor. If you’d asked me, I would have told you that I was going to be a dermatologist.”

Huber was a pre-med student for her first year and a half of college, and has actually taken all the courses necessary to apply to med-school. However, she said she was unhappy the entire time, and eventually realized that she was only going into medicine because she didn’t know about anything else.

“I reached out to a lot of other kids and just asked them questions about what they were doing and what types of classes they were taking, and I found them so much more interesting. I thought business was a perfect blend of analytics and creativity.”

She said she still felt some parental pressure to be a doctor, but eventually, during her biology final, hit her breaking point and decided to go with business.

“It’s a funny story. We had to just titrate – literally get 7.65 ml and just put it into a beaker and get the exact amount. I was off by quite a few ml, and it was like, horrible. I just put my hands down and said to the professor, “I’m switching into business next semester. Can you please just pass me?”

Alice Lu

Alice Lu

Alice Lu, McDonough School of Business

Alice Lu, on the other hand, went to the McDonough School of Business before she was really sure what she wanted to study.

“I was born in Georgetown Hospital, and I’ve always lived in this area. Georgetown is near my house, so I’m able to see my younger sisters grow up and not miss out on their early years. They’re nine and 10 years old,” she says. “Being in the business school was something that I didn’t really plan on. In high school I didn’t have any particular interest in business, I just applied to Georgetown on a whim.”

At first, she actually considered leaving the business school and switching to the school of foreign service, since she was more interested in international affairs. However after being at the school for a year, she says she realized how many opportunities studying business can give her, and she is currently majoring in finance and international business, minoring in Chinese, and hoping to work in international finance.

“Freshman year I took a course on international business and I really loved it. I loved the professor as well, and I ended up doing research for him. We published a research case in his textbook my freshman year, so that really got me interested in international business, and I decided to stay.”

According to Lu, her international interests were spurred by a childhood of traveling to China to visit her grandparents. “Those were always the happiest memories for me, and I think childhood memories are something that we’re very fond of,” she says. Despite not following through with her plan to study foreign service, she hasn’t turned away from her original intent. Business, as it turned out, was the right medium for her to pursue it.

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