Alumni Success Stories

Kwame Williams: Senior Financial Analyst with Polo Ralph Lauren

Next month Kwame Williams will complete his first year of service with Polo Ralph Lauren. Kwame, who graduated from the evening program in the spring and has enjoyed more golfing and fishing this summer than he has in several years, says that he is already growing restless with the extra time he finds he has on his hands since completing his Bryan MBA.

Kwame recently became a member of the Bryan School Alumni Board and he is contemplating coming back to the Bryan School to pursue the new online certificate in supply chain, logistics, and transportation management. “Ralph Lauren is expanding internationally and the skills in supply chain would be useful to me and the company as we are aggressively building our distribution network in Southeast Asia.”

Kwame is originally from Greensboro and he attended NCA&T where he graduated with his bachelor’s in finance in 2004. Prior to joining Ralph Lauren, Kwame was an accounts receivable supervisor with project management responsibility at Pepsi Bottling Group in Winston-Salem and spent seven years with UPS as a finance supervisor where he managed a finance team of 100 employees for the company’s West Carolina district.

He completed the evening program in just over two years of part-time study. “My last semester was a heavy one as I loaded up on credit hours to finish the program and I was still going through the learning curve in my new position with Ralph Lauren, but with the exception of that final semester, the workload in the evening program was manageable. I took summer classes both years and I picked up some credit through a study abroad trip to Germany.”

“It is a tough decision to commit to pursuing an MBA as a working professional, but for anyone who is considering making the leap into the Bryan MBA program, I can honestly say that I enjoyed every minute I spent in the program and I learned much more than I ever expected, particularly in the areas of quantitative and decision analysis.”

-September 2009