In UVA Darden’s Classroom Building, Six Alumni Put Career Advice on the Wall

“It won’t all make sense right away.”

Those seven words appear beside a large portrait of Matt Reintjes (MBA ’04), president and CEO of YETI, in the Classroom Building at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

“When I came to Darden, I knew I wanted to run businesses — but that was about as specific as my plan got,” he tells students.

For a man who now runs a global consumer brand, the message is refreshingly unscripted.

Five more alumni have joined Reintjes along the ground-floor hallway, their portraits paired with equally candid advice about work, leadership and the uncertain business of building a career.

Dorothy Batten (MBA ’90), who traded conventional corporate paths for entrepreneurship, nonprofit leadership and regenerative agriculture, tells students their careers need not look like everyone else’s.

Pablo Ciano (MBA ’00), CEO of DHL eCommerce, urges them to focus on the work immediately in front of them. Jonathan Vassil (EMBA ’18), chief revenue officer at Toast, says to take ownership before feeling entirely ready.

Patrice Ju (MBA ’14), a senior leader in Google Cloud Engineering/Security, acknowledges the moments that test you. Kelly Thomson (MBA ’99), head of capital markets at Mubadala Capital, offers a reminder that careers are not built alone: “Take help when it’s offered.”

The new alumni spotlight installation is graphic and spare: oversized photography, saturated blues, flashes of orange and short first-person reflections designed to catch the eye between classes.

Read in sequence, the panels trace a career’s less predictable contours: uncertainty, possibility, action, ownership, challenge and support.

The words originated in conversations last winter between the alumni and six Darden School Foundation student ambassadors, all members of the Full-Time MBA Class of 2027. Fisher Morton interviewed Reintjes; Gila Schwarzschild spoke with Batten; Emma Huckins with Ciano; Josephine Kong with Vassil; Nick Wey with Ju; and Pauline Jaffe with Thomson.

Those exchanges became the material for the finished panels, turning the hallway into something more than a gallery of accomplished graduates.

Darden’s Career Development Office helps students explore their ambitions through individual coaching, recruiting and connections with employers. Alumni extend that support by offering advice, sharing opportunities and opening doors across industries.

On these walls, the Darden alumni network offers something less transactional: perspective.

A student asks a question. Someone who once occupied the same classrooms answers it. Another student encounters that answer on the way to class.

The installation arrived in September as a new academic year began and Yael Grushka-Cockayne entered her first semester as dean. Its design anticipates more arrivals. The panels can be updated with new portraits and reflections, allowing other alumni to share what they have learned with students who follow.

For now, six graduates face the classroom doors.

Inside, students work through cases that demand decisions without the benefit of knowing how the story ends.

Outside, the alumni offer a little perspective on the careers awaiting them beyond those doors.