Senior Spotlight: Shannon Kane, BS ’18 (Marketing)

Monday, February 5, 2018

A senior in the Krannert School, Shannon Kane describes herself as a “passionate and hardworking student striving to have a forward-looking and equitable impact through marketing.”

She began making that impact as a freshman as a special projects consultant working with Krannert administrators, faculty and staff to get students involved in school and University-wide programs. She continues in that role today, and has also completed internships at Broadband Antenna Tracking Systems, the Purdue Research Foundation and the Indiana Soybean Alliance.

In 2015, Melissa Evens, director of the Undergraduate Communication Studio at Krannert, asked Kane to design an activity to be showcased at Purdue’s Annual Spring Fest. Having been given quite a bit of creative freedom, she hoped to develop an event that would not only create awareness of management careers among the local youth, but also encourage Krannert undergraduate students to become more involved in the local community.

With these goals in mind, Kane developed the Minute Business Challenge (MBC), an activity that presents community members of all ages with real-world business problems and gives them the opportunity to create innovative solutions with the help of Krannert undergraduates. She published her account of the experience in the Purdue Journal of Service-Learning and International Engagement in 2017.

“It has been immeasurably rewarding to see an idea grow into an annual tradition commended by Krannert’s faculty and other community members,” Kane wrote. “Seeing how much the children enjoy designing their solutions and how their creative minds come alive when given the space to think strategically is an incredible thing to observe.

“The MBC allowed me to apply marketing principles learned in my coursework to manage a large-scale project. It required me to be intentional about the target market, marketing strategy and other promotional strategies while confined to a relatively small budget.

“I now have a better understanding of how to develop and advertise an activity like this from start to finish. In the future, I intend to expand the event through additional classroom visits and collaboration with other local, youth-oriented groups. I will consider new marketing strategies and outlets for expansion since attendance was the most difficult hurdle. I hope the tradition continues after I graduate.”