Michael Lau (MBA’20; MSBA’21)
Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, HG Insights
The U.S. military may not have coined the phrase “embrace the suck,” but it certainly popularized it as an ethos for making the best of a bad situation.
Michael Lau has mastered it.
In the final year of his Leeds MBA, the former U.S. Army sergeant was extended an offer to return part-time to the marketing internship he completed in the summer. As the months went by, he was certain that he’d be getting a full-time offer after graduation, to the point where he and his wife celebrated it.
“I was like, ‘It would take an act of God for me not to get this,’” Michael said. “Two weeks later, COVID happened, and they had to rescind the offer. That was a very humbling moment.”
Invaluable experience
Michael applied elsewhere, but heard the same story most job-seekers heard in the spring of 2020. That’s how, with the ink on his diploma barely dry, he wound up back in the classroom, this time in the business analytics master’s program.
“It was kind of like that nightmare where you’re back in high school—just a sense of déjà vu where you’re asking yourself, am I really going to commit another year of my life to this?” Michael said.
But he’s the first to say the experience was invaluable, especially as he looks to advance his career in marketing and keep an eye on rising through the ranks.
“One of the things an education should do is challenge your own ideas, as opposed to just reinforcing what you already know.”
Michael Lau (MBA’20; MSBA’21)
“I’m able to ask the right questions of people who’ve been doing this for five or 10 years—I can speak the language that makes sense to them, and I can also understand it,” he said. “In many ways, it was like a language course—you’re learning programming languages and learning how to speak them so you can do your job more effectively.”
At HG Insights, Michael’s work focuses on planning and executing digital campaigns, then evaluating their success and making tweaks as needed. His MBA means he knows what strategic questions to ask, while his business analytics degree helps him frame those questions for analysts.
“It’s very valuable to prove a campaign isn’t doing well, as opposed to just feeling that way,” Michael said. “That lets you drive decisions using data, as opposed to just experience.”
‘Stubbornly determined’
That kind of informed decision-making helped him choose Leeds, but the school actually came on his radar when his father—a university professor who still lives in Hong Kong—gave his son some Ƶ swag—a water bottle, which he still has—after attending a conference near Fort Carson, where Michael was stationed.
Sound impulsive? He doesn’t disagree, calling himself “stubbornly determined.”
“I think tenacity has been something I’ve really embraced, not just in returning to America”—he and his family moved to Hong Kong when he was 9—“but in joining the Army, in pursuing higher education.”
Something he liked most about his grad school experience was the diverse network he built as a result of all the connections he made.
“It was just like the military—you meet all sorts of different people, from different walks of life, with different backgrounds,” Michael said. “Those differences are so important, because one of the things an education should do is challenge your own ideas, as opposed to just reinforcing what you already know. That was something I took from the military and graduate school, and it’s been helpful to me both personally and professionally.”