When a company reorganization at Delta Air Lines eliminated Samantha Holmes’s communications position, she had 60 days to find another job within the company or accept a severance package. She wanted to stay. To find a way forward, Samantha began looking beyond her job title to find broader applications for the skills she had developed as a student at BYU-Idaho.
In addition to completing communications coursework for her major emphasis, Samantha had also taken classes in ethics and law, computer science, social sciences, organizational effectiveness, and public relations. Those classes introduced concepts that she now finds useful every day in her new role in pilot scheduling at Delta, a field she had not known existed before.
“I started just digging up every other skill that I had,” Holmes said. “And sure enough, having some … skills in computer science, legal practice, all these different things I worked on at BYU-Idaho … it looked really good when I put all together.”
Samantha now coordinates pilot assignments to ensure coverage for thousands of flights while navigating federal aviation regulations and pilot union agreements. Her new responsibilities are different from her previous communications work, but according to Samantha, the breadth of her BYU-Idaho education equipped her with skills and experiences that extended beyond a conventional communications position.
“All my classes were so diverse, and I had to deep dive into so many different types of projects, different environments, different ways of learning things. When I said, okay, I need to find a new job, I was able to say, I can do things that are outside my niche,” Samantha said. “I am a great communicator, but that doesn't mean that I have to have a role that says ‘communication specialist’ in it.”
Before landing a job at Delta, Samantha wondered whether her BYU-Idaho degree would even allow her to compete with applicants who held degrees from larger, better-known universities.
“Growing up in Georgia … I was surrounded by every SEC school,” she said “And I wondered … if I would even have a shot at some of these bigger companies. Like, do they even want to hire from a place like BYU-Idaho?”
Landing a dream job at Delta, and later transitioning into an entirely different role, changed that perspective.
“You can go to big companies with BYU-Idaho, and you don't have to have an SEC or Ivy League school on your resume,” Samantha said.