Love of the Classroom, Interest in Analytics Led Former US Army Officer to UVA MSBA Program — Just Months After Graduating From Darden

When Dan Gogue (MBA ’21) graduated from the University of Virginia Darden School of Business in May 2021, he began a new, post-MBA career as an associate brand manager with The Hershey Co. — and almost immediately went right back to school.

Currently earning a Master of Science in business analytics through the UVA program delivered in partnership between Darden and the McIntire School of Commerce, Gogue said the decision to return for more schooling so soon was driven by a love of the Darden classroom and the desire to further build on a foundation of data and analytics — and, secondarily, a desire to earn the distinction of “Double Hoo.”

The career trajectory for the former U.S. Army Officer is remarkable considering business school was not even on his radar until, when visiting his wife at the UVA School of Law, Gogue said he asked about the large, columned complex next door.

“She said, ‘That’s Darden, the business school,” Gogue said. “So, I thought, I guess I’ll go to business school.”

Enrolling in the Class of 2019, Gogue said he knew Darden was the key to a career transition, but wasn’t sure how the next phase would unfold or where it would lead. To his surprise, he found his interest piqued by the then unknown world of marketing.

“When I first started, I probably thought marketing meant advertising,” said Gogue. “With the help of some excellent marketing professors at Darden, I quickly learned that marketers, especially in the CPG space, are really general managers, and often running P&L for a brand. Once I learned how much leadership and business ownership there could be for marketers, I knew what I wanted to do.”

Gogue, who credits professors Tami Kim and Kimberly Whitler with helping to frame his orientation toward the field, came to Darden with established leadership credentials, serving in the U.S. Army for six years in roles including tank platoon leader, battalion scout platoon leader and lead instructor at the Armor Basic Officer Leader Course at Fort Benning in Georgia. What the former international affairs major says he lacked, however, was recent quantitative experience, having not taken a math course since freshman statistics at American University.

Gogue said Darden professors including Sasa Zorc, Max Biggs, Dana Popescu, and Joe Andrasko taught him that you don’t need to be a statistician to tap into the power of data analytics and database tools and start making better business decisions.

Gogue “learned to love what could be done” with data and analytics tools, and continued to pursue his interests in his Second Year, taking “Data Science and Business” with Professor Michael Albert and learning about data’s role in project management with Professor Yael Grushka-Cockayne, for instance.

“At Darden, there are a lot of spots where you can really dive in and learn more if you want,” said Gogue. “I realized I wanted to dive in more here, and learn code at a deeper level and learn a bit more about some of the technology out there. That’s ultimately what led me to the MSBA program.”

As a veteran, Gogue still had a portion of his military benefits available via the GI Bill that could be put to use for the 12-month MSBA program. So, even as he graduated and began working full time at The Hershey Co. as an associate brand manager for Reese’s, he also set his sights on another year of instruction in the professional program.

While taking classes and learning the ropes in a still relatively new job requires a tolerance for absorbing large amounts of information, Gogue said it’s largely a joyful process.

“Darden made me fall in love with being in school again,” said Gogue. “I literally love learning in the classroom.”

Roughly six months into the program, Gogue said he’s getting what he hoped to out of the classroom, diving deeper into Python coding capabilities with professors like Albert and picking up new skillsets from McIntire professors. Gogue called a course on customer analytics with Professor Richard Netemeyer “an absolute joy,” for instance, noting the framework the class has learned to connect seemingly disparate threads such as employee satisfaction to customer satisfaction and eventually company profit.

“That’s been a powerful realization, that there are these frameworks out there, and it just takes proper data collection and the statistical know-how to go out and operationalize them,” said Gogue. “I really appreciate that approach of, here’s an actual business framework that has been studied and verified, and here’s how you operationalize that framework.”

Also, just as the Darden Military Association made Gogue comfortable bringing his whole identity to class as he studied at Darden, the veteran contingent in the MSBA program is similarly robust and supportive, he said.

As an associate brand manager at The Hershey Co., Gogue finds himself living the expansive view of marketing he first learned about at Darden. Starting as the lead analytics associate on his team, he said he quickly learned to “understand the brand from the numbers perspective,” studying everything from retail performance and factory output to media spend, and then aggregating the data and compiling it into an understandable narrative. Gogue also recently took over NCAA partnerships for the Reese’s brand and said he’s working on the “in-store execution” of an upcoming “innovation project.”

“I was still very fresh at Hershey when this program started, and I think I’ve been pretty successful doing the things I’ve had to do so far,” said Gogue. “I’ve been able to work hard and be a contributing member of the class. I’ve really enjoyed that.