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It's All About the Students Making Leaps and Bounds Towards Success - Behind the Scenes

  • Casci Carpenter, Eastern Oregon University
  • Jun 10, 2019
  • 3 min read

The Eastern Oregon University National Millennial and Gen Z Community has been busy this year; these are just some things we have been up to as a chapter. We help each other become the best we can be: the best leaders and the best students. As a chapter we have done local trips, and speaker visits to build our chapter and community around us. Each day we are becoming better individuals, and learning something new. National Millennial Community and Gen Z at the national level has been our catalyst to want to do more behind the scenes.

As a chapter we made a huge decision to put in more work, and make the most out of our chapter, and time as a college student in NMC. We made connections to alumni, and started networking. We hosted Mr. Bill Imada to speak on campus to help students around us understand advertising better. On top of this, we still attended the executive trips at the national level with other chapters. Needless to say, we have had a great year!

Eastern Oregon University National Millennial Community Visits Nike World Headquarters

Pictured: Adam Donnelly (alumni), Dustin Zimmerly, Josh Leiferman, Dr. Shari Carpenter, Travis Morscheck (alumni), & Casci Carpenter

Beaverton, Oregon- Easter Oregon University National Millennial Community students, and alumni get to reconnect while getting to tour the Nike Global Campus. This was a huge stepping-stone, and opportunity to get the insider of Nike from two EOU alumni who have made a career at Nike.

Making these connections are vital for our campus’ students to be recognized. Being able to have conversation about the millennial generation, and what is expected out of us as we enter the workforce in this extremely competitive environment. It was beneficial to hear from our alumni as they have had experience in the workforce as a millennial.

Not only did this open a new door for our chapter, but also we got to meet a few famous people while we were on campus. One of our members, Dustin Zimmerly is a collegiate cross country and track athlete here at EOU, and he got to meet Mr. Alberto Salazar. Alberto Salazar is an American Track Nike coach, and former world-class long distance runner.

Alberto Salazar & Dustin Zimmerly

Nike campus was amazing to get to walk around and analyze the culture that everyone works in. There are so many employees there, and a variety of workspace options for employees. On campus there are gyms, daycare, hair care, small shops, lots of food venue, and it goes on and on. This is all open to the employees; this is a company that truly cares about their employees.

Mr. Bill Imada, Eastern Oregon University National Millennial Community Co-Founder Comes to Visit, and Share His Knowledge With the Students.

Mr. Bill Imada

Mr. Bill Imada is originally from Ontario, Oregon where as he has made his path to Hollywood. He owns an ad agency called IW Group. He understands the meaning behind an advertisement, so he came to share his knowledge with us here at Eastern Oregon University.

On February 15th, EOU NMC hosted Bill Imada for an event on campus to learn more about Bill’s journey to get to where he is at now, and to understand what companies are thinking when making an advertisement.

The students started with participating in an activity to get their creative mind thinking together. “By using pictures we created a story, this story was based of the person before. We went down the line of students, and made our unique story of how we portrayed the picture Bill gave us,” said John Brown.

Pictured: EOU Students

When going over the brand archetypes there were four categories Bill Presented, “Internal, External, Order, and Change”. Each company falls underneath on of these four categories, and makes their statement. For example, the company Apple is “The Creator”, or Pampers are “The Caregivers”. As Bill was teaching the students he said, “It’s about what the company is trying to portray themselves as- think deeper”.

While keeping these in mind we watched Super Bowl commercials, and analyzed how they related to the companies archetype. Good conversation was started about the reasoning behind this, and how companies are changing to get their message across in three to fifteen seconds.

Thank you

Eastern Oregon University Chapter of National Millennial Community would like to send a huge thank you to Mr. Bill Imada for helping us become so successful. Not only did we do these events as a chapter, but also we attended trips with other chapters. These trips help us with develop our professional skills, and experience the life in companies. Each company is different to interact with, and this can help us with career success in knowing what we want coming out of college.

Cody Singer, Dr. Shari Carpenter, Sam Wagerman, Josh Leiferman, Mr. Bill Imada, Alex Navarro, Brittany Hargrove, & Casci Carpenter


 
 
 

19 Comments


lee white
lee white
Jun 06

Coming back to this piece after sharing it with my professional network this week — the response from people in marketing, advertising, and student affairs has been strong. The EOU NMC chapter has built something that punches well above its institutional weight class, and the combination of the Nike visit, the Bill Imada session, and the executive trips with other chapters represents a professional development curriculum that most MBA programs would be proud of. For the full remaining toolkit — a dog age and care guide is something I use for my own dog who attends most of my at-home work sessions. A camping checklist template adapted for chapter retreat logistics covers practical details that tend to get missed. A recipe calorie…

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lee white
lee white
Jun 06

Dustin Zimmerly meeting Alberto Salazar is the moment in this piece that will probably mean the most to Dustin for the rest of his life, regardless of how his athletic or professional career develops. Salazar is one of the most significant figures in American distance running history, and the fact that a collegiate cross-country athlete from Eastern Oregon got to meet him because his student organization had the organizational ambition to arrange a Nike campus visit is a beautiful illustration of how opportunity compounds when you put yourself in motion. The NMC chapter didn't plan for that encounter — they created the conditions under which it became possible. For the creative side of documenting and sharing moments like this, a…

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lee white
lee white
Jun 06

The IW Group context for Bill Imada's visit is worth unpacking for anyone who doesn't know the agency. IW Group specializes in multicultural marketing, which means Imada's perspective on brand archetypes isn't coming from the mainstream advertising tradition — it's coming from someone who has spent his career thinking about how brands communicate across cultural contexts where the same archetype can land very differently depending on the audience. That's a more sophisticated version of the framework than most introductory advertising courses teach, and the EOU NMC students got it directly from someone who has applied it at the highest level. For the global and cross-cultural side of this analytical work, a random country generator has been a useful starting point for…

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lee white
lee white
Jun 06

Eastern Oregon University is not the first institution most people think of when they imagine students touring Nike headquarters and hosting Hollywood advertising executives. That's exactly why this story matters. The NMC model is demonstrating that geographic location and institutional prestige are not the binding constraints on professional development that conventional wisdom suggests — the binding constraint is whether a chapter has the organizational will to build the connections and create the opportunities. EOU NMC has that will, and the Nike visit and Bill Imada session are the evidence. For the practical toolkit that supports building this kind of program at a regional university, a square footage room planner helps evaluate whether campus spaces can accommodate the event formats being planned.…

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lee white
lee white
Jun 06

The three-to-fifteen second window that Bill Imada referenced for modern advertising is the detail that should stop every student in the room. Three seconds. That's the attention budget a brand has to activate an archetype, establish an emotional connection, and make a memorable impression before a viewer scrolls or skips. Understanding that constraint changes how you think about every element of a creative brief — every word, every visual choice, every sound is load-bearing when you have three seconds to work with. The students who internalized that constraint during the Super Bowl commercial analysis session left with a professional instinct that most marketing graduates don't develop until years into their careers. For the wellness side of sustaining the kind of…

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