An excerpt from the interview of Joe Favorito, someone who has over 35 years of strategic communications/marketing, business development and public relations expertise in sports, entertainment, brand building, media training, television, athletic administration and business.
Q) How have you seen sports business education evolve? It's getting more specific, more specialized and you're seeing many more people also get into it. From your perspective as a professor, how do you view that side of sport?
A) You have to figure out the skills that you have, the story that you can tell and that separates you from everybody else. That's the most important thing that you have to establish. There's been a lot of talk about personal brand and how you build your personal brand. Well, your brand is who you've been for your entire life.
You have to have the ability to do many things these days and focus on helping people get their job done. Going forward to be able to have at least a working knowledge of lots of areas, whether it's digital, social, mobile marketing, sales, law, entertainment.
"As far as education goes, personal education is a lot more important than what you learn in a classroom. The skills that you can pick up by having conversations, by learning from people around you are really important."
I think that undergraduate education is much less valuable than graduate education and graduate education is valuable at a core number of schools versus the hundreds that are out there right now. What do you get from that faculty? What can you get from the students around you? How can you maximize the alumni and what’s in the physical location of where that school is? How does that help you get to the next level? You always have to be thinking about what that value proposition is, whether it's worth the dollars and how you use that to leverage your next opportunity.
It’s important that anyone who's looking at university on any level realizes that you define the experience, the experience doesn't define you. You're going in there to extract every possible opportunity out of what they're offering. You're not sitting back and worrying on a Friday night about watching Netflix. You want to go and figure out where you can volunteer and learn things. When you learn things, you find out what you like, but also what you don't like. That's really important in ruling out those things that may not be that important.
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