Poets & Quants Features Best & Brightest Executive MBA

In her interview with Poets & Quants magazine, Ashley Bruno, MBA ’24, says the McCombs School of Business was the natural choice when she decided to go back to school. “It was not only a top program, but it provided me the chance to be a Longhorn.” Bruno, 38, is the director of revenue operations at Data.world in Austin. She says she chose the executive MBA program because it made it easier to juggle the time commitment and because she wanted to be in a class with people who had her level of experience. “I felt that I could more closely associate with folks who are at a similar level in their careers and have similar aspirations as I do.”

The biggest lesson, she says, that she learned while getting her MBA didn’t come from any single class; it came from the course work as a whole. “To understand a business in its entirety,” she says, “you cannot just look at a single piece of the business. You must look at all parts from finance, to marketing, to product, to org structure and company culture.”

Bruno says she is also thankful for her study group. Her mother died toward the end of her completion of her MBA. “My EMBA study group rallied around me and made sure that they supported me in any way they could, including taking on additional portions of my work in our last group project together,” she says. “I owe each of them and McCombs itself a huge gratitude as I would not have been able to complete my work without them.”