Soccer enthusiast Holden Roumay feeds his marketing passion at Daniels
It only took a week out West to convince Holden Roumay that Denver was the right place to pursue new life experiences. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that five years in Denver convinced him that the full-time Denver MBA program at the Daniels College of Business was the right graduate program to elevate his career to the next level.
Roumay moved to Denver soon after a 2016 visit and hasn’t looked back, taking full advantage of everything the city and the mountain region has to offer. A former treasurer for the men’s club soccer team at the University of Central Florida who also has over eight years of work experience in the soccer retail space post-graduation, Roumay has gotten a kick out of life in the Rockies so far.
“I came out to visit my two best friends for a week-long trip just over five years ago. I went snowboarding for the first time and explored downtown. This gave me a great sense of the atmosphere that Denver emanates,” Roumay said of his life-altering trip. “I knew right away that I wanted to move here, and after six months of saving I packed my car and made the journey out to Denver.
When it came time to pursue an MBA, the University of Denver provided Roumay with the opportunity to stay in the city he’s grown to love while providing the quality, dynamic business education he wanted. A sustainability concentration within the MBA program, Roumay – a self-styled individualist when he arrived on campus – has fully taken to the team-oriented nature of the program that has pushed him into group projects.
“Prior to the start of the program, I believed that I worked best on my own and was more focused on how I was going to benefit from the program individually,” Roumay said. “After getting to know most of my classmates, I can genuinely say my mindset has shifted dramatically. I am working on using my strengths to benefit those around me, and in turn, am utilizing the expertise of those within the cohort to become a more well-rounded professional.”
Roumay and his classmates specifically enjoyed their experience with the program’s Entrepreneurship Challenge, where students are tasked with creating a startup from scratch over 10 weeks while learning design thinking, ideation and innovation skills.
The Entrepreneurship Challenge is the first of four challenges (which also includes Social Good, Corporate and Global challenges) that are foundational to the Denver MBA program, and one that immediately challenges students in different and deep ways.
“This challenge tested our thought processes, as we were asked to implement design thinking into every aspect of the class,” Roumay said. “I was lucky enough to have an amazing group of people on my team which added to the enjoyment through the 10 weeks allotted for the challenge. It was a great feeling to be placed outside of our comfort zones and having seen our hard work come to fruition on the last night of class, where every team presented their final pitches and celebrated together upon completion.”
The student dynamic is not the only aspect of the program that has stood out for Roumay thus far, though. Daniels faculty feature a variety of prior experiences and teaching styles which allows students to get a full flavor for real-world experiences while also embracing the uniqueness of the Denver MBA’s curriculum and content. Every student usually finds a favorite instructor or two that just clicks with their own interests and learning styles, and Roumay is no exception to that general rule.
“Professor Lowell [Valencia-Miller] has been the highlight of the program for me thus far,” Roumay said. “He was able to bring his wide array of professional experiences into the topics we were studying each week. Listening to first-hand experiences from someone who has such an eclectic professional background provides a richer learning experience, one that is hard to find anywhere else.”
Luckily for Roumay, he didn’t need to look elsewhere – at least once he fell in love with Denver six years ago.
“There has never been a dull moment since I moved here, and I can always find something to do,” he said. “From hiking, camping, and park days in the summer to taking full advantage of my Ikon and Epic passes during the winter, I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”
