Rachael Baptiste

I'm sitting at the kitchen table and it is my dad's birthday. The big bad Brian Baptiste, all-powerful and all-knowing...at least my 4 year old self thought so. My mom sneakily slides a blank white envelope across the kitchen table towards him. Red Sox tickets. He opens the envelope and I'm looking at his big green eyes light up as he involuntarily cracks a smile. "Thanks Kath." Typical dad reaction, no verbal excitement but we all know he's pumped.

It doesn't seem like too thrilling of a story, but that moment was a defining one in my life. After watching my father's impulse reaction to receiving this gift, I became so interested in the way that material things can have an impact on the way people feel. Red Sox tickets made my dad ecstatic, but those same tickets could make a different person wince in disinterest. This concept not only excited me, it also led me to pursue a future in the marketing field.

My passion is people. How people act in certain situations, what makes them happy, what makes them laugh. It amazes me that I go to a school with 23,000 other people who are relatively the same age as me, and every single one of us is so extremely different from one another. We've all experienced different events and faced different obstacles which have shaped us in different ways. It's insane.

If one day, I'm pujrsuing the art of marketing, figuring out how to target all of the vastly different personalities of the world and convince them that they should have a shared interest in my product, whatever it may be, I will consider myself successful. My dream is to make a living out of marketing. Because there's nothing more exciting to a thinking being than studying how other people think.