Jackson Graney
Bucknell University, Freeman College of Management
“Loyal friend and leader striving to remain perpetually curious and pet every dog he passes.”
Fun fact about yourself: There is a 9-year age gap between my youngest brother and me.
Hometown: Hunt Valley, MD
High School: Gilman School
Major: Markets, Innovation & Design; Psychology (Double Major)
Favorite Business Course: Analytics & Operations Management 315: Guinness to Globalization
While it has the unfair advantage of being the course I took during my incredible summer abroad, Guinness to Globalization was my favorite business course I have taken so far in the Freeman College of Management. Professor Joe Wilck did an incredible job tailoring the course to our Dublin surroundings, teaching us about how Ireland’s supply chains and operations evolved through history. On the days we had class, we would attend morning lectures before meeting outside the classroom at many of the locations we discussed. Of the trips we took, I most enjoyed visiting the Belfast shipyard where the Titanic and other ships were built, the Guinness storehouse strategically located along the River Liffey to export product to other European countries, and a sheep farm related to the textiles industry. Visiting these incredible sites and others ensured that the material we learned in the classroom would be engrained in my mind forever.
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles During College:
Freeman Fellow mentor/MGMT 100 teaching assistant
Open Discourse Coalition Leadership Seminar graduate
Alpha Lambda Delta National Honor Society member
Freeman College of Management marketing intern
Markets, Innovation & Design student leader
Club ice hockey player
Bucknell Consulting Group co-president
Admissions ambassador
Dean’s list (7/7 Completed Semesters)
Where have you interned during your college career?
- Hershey Entertainment and Resorts, Hershey, PA: Marketing intern (Summer 2025)
- Freeman College of Management, Lewisburg, PA: Dean’s marketing intern (2025-26)
- Tomahawk, Auckland, New Zealand: Search engine optimization content intern (Spring 2025)
- GreenAer, Dublin, Ireland: Marketing, communications, and business support intern (Summer 2024)
Where will you be working after graduation? Undecided
Who is your favorite business professor? Professor Eric Santanen was the first professor I met at Bucknell. In the five years since we first connected on a Zoom call, he has remained one of my go-to sources for advice. During my first semester of college, I brought him my ambitious plan to graduate with two majors and two study-abroad experiences – all within four years. Instead of attempting to dissuade me, Professor Santanen helped me plan out my college career and remained encouraging through setbacks that threatened to derail my plan.
In Technological Dystopia (MGMT 303), he challenged me not to believe every thought that crosses my mind and taught me how to find the buried truths within corporate signaling. The course also taught me how to analyze decisions through a critical lens by applying ethical theories to actions taken by corporations and politicians. Topics ranged from personal privacy to the advent of AI and the implications that it may have on both my career and life in general. Lastly, the writing assignments in this course taught me how to write in an entirely new way, using evidence to shape my work rather than my hopes for what I want the work to say. Through both teaching me in the classroom and advising me in his office, Professor Santanen has made an immeasurable impact on my success in college.
What is the biggest lesson you gained from studying business? The biggest lesson I have gained from studying business is the importance of networking in every aspect of life. The path to my dream summer internship began from a casual conversation with my aunt about my aspirations, which then led to a discovery visit at Hershey Entertainment and Resorts a year before I had the chance to join their team. While this was an incredibly fortunate experience, the advice from more traditional networking opportunities has also been incredibly influential in my process of discovering what I hope to achieve in my career. Additionally, I have been surprised yet grateful for how willing people in my circles have been to make introductions to help me achieve my goals. You never know who someone else may be connected.
What advice would you give to a student looking to major in a business-related field? I would encourage a student looking to major in a business-related field to think about their personal definition of success. I strongly believe that success should not be defined in comparison to others, but rather as the pursuit and achievement of opportunities that align with one’s own goals. Whether it’s a smaller success like submitting an assignment on time or a larger one such as passing a difficult course, finding ways to feel accomplished and recognizing that feeling can be incredibly rewarding. Identifying what your version of success looks like will help you set goals to accomplish incredible achievements. But it is equally important to ensure that when you do succeed, you take a moment to celebrate that success!
Looking back over your experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently in business school and why? While I didn’t give myself much flexibility to do so, I would have loved to take more courses in the other departments of the Freeman College of Management. There are so many professors that my friends have raved about and so many courses that piqued my interest which I unfortunately won’t have the opportunity to take before I graduate. I also have really enjoyed the finance and business analytics courses that I have taken and would have liked to take more in each department.
What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What is one insight you gained from using AI? In my Markets, Innovation & Design capstone course, Marketing Management, Professor Douglas Allen heavily encouraged my classmates and I to use LLM software to generate user personas of potential customers for a new-to-market protein powder company. This insight, along with the direction to target a specific demographic, allowed my teammates and I to propose a persona representative of a high-productivity professional with both career and personal tensions. Using this persona, we created a brand that highlighted many of this customer’s pain points. In the process, we proposed the product as an opportunity to relieve the dissonance competing products forced the customer to face.
Which academic, extracurricular or personal achievement are you most proud of? I am most proud of the growth that I have seen in myself as both a student and person over the years, specifically during my time in college. While I am proud of what I accomplished before coming to Bucknell, I feel that being on this campus has turned me into a nearly unrecognizable person from my high school self. Specifically, I think of how I’ve become a mentor for younger students, spent 6 months studying in foreign countries, added a second major, and worked three simultaneous on-campus jobs as major accomplishments, especially in the face of some of the most difficult situations I have encountered so far in my life. I am confident that my ambition, love for learning, and desire to make positive impacts on people’s lives will be traits that stick with me as I begin my professional career.
Which classmate do you most admire? The classmate that I admire most is Julia Dembowitz. We met in the same MGMT 100 recitation and have since shared a class together in all but one semester. Julia’s ambition to balance being a student-athlete, pursue two minors, have a full social calendar, and take on leadership positions in classes was infectious, and she inspired my desire to maximize my own time on campus. Additionally, she is incredibly resilient, tackling major injuries and other setbacks with a determined attitude. Lastly, I have never seen her act short of kind to anyone around her. I feel that the world would be better with more Julias in it and I am so thankful to have been able to call her my friend over the past four years of college.
Who would you most want to thank for your success? I want to thank both of my parents for always supporting me in my pursuits. While my middle and high school classrooms were very competitive, my parents always encouraged me to do the best that I could and to be proud of my own accomplishments instead of comparing them to those of others around me. This ultimately led me to pursue a career in marketing; without this support, I may have felt pressured to pursue a career where my passions do not lie.
I am also so incredibly grateful for the opportunities that they have given me, especially knowing the stark differences between the childhood my dad had from my own. His ability to provide my brothers and I with the lives we have had has been so inspiring to me. It has encouraged me to work as hard as possible in hopes to do the same for any children I may have in the future. My mom has always been my rock; she celebrates my successes with me and is the first to listen when I feel I have fallen short. She has taught me to always treat people with respect, a lesson that has resonated deeply with me my entire life and has been a key piece of getting me to where I am today.
What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?
1) I hope to spend an extended amount of time in my career in a purpose-based organization. I am extremely passionate about the idea of knowing that work I do during the day goes to meaningfully improve the lives of others.
2) It is extremely important to me that after I graduate, I continue to learn and stay curious about the world. I could see myself achieving this both in structured ways like graduate school and informally through embracing opportunities as they present themselves. I’d also love to see more of the world and better understand the way that people live their lives in different cultures.
What made Jackson such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?
“Jackson truly embodies the “management as a liberal art” philosophy of the Freeman College of Management curriculum. This is evident in everything he has pursued at Bucknell, from a double major spanning two colleges to two study-abroad experiences in different nations. His educational experiences, both planned and unplanned, together with his varied leadership roles, have helped him embrace the habits of mind that are central to the Markets, Innovation & Design major — in particular embracing ambiguity.
The variety of educational opportunities Jackson has pursued have enhanced his ability to approach problems from multiple, integrated perspectives, ultimately arriving at novel solutions and fresh insights that are often overlooked by others. This was especially evident in class when we would explore controversial and complex social issues. During one particularly memorable class discussion, Jackson announced that he wanted to change the perspective he had previously championed because the counter evidence had simply grown beyond his personal comfort level. I am certain his flexibility, curiosity and open-minded perspective will feature prominently in his future success.”
Eric Santanen, Ph.D.
Associate Professor and Chair of the Markets, Innovation, and Design Department
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