BYU alumnus Benjamin Dowdy shares his career journey and how he found his sweet spot at Hershey.
When asked to envision a successful career path, does your mind immediately imagine a straight and simple road or one that’s winding and turning? The journey to a fruitful career is usually construed as something linear—rising straight to the top, for example. In a recent BYU Connect webinar, Benjamin Dowdy (Japanese ’16, MBA '24), associate brand manager of Halloween at Hershey, challenged this idea. He shared his own experience, illustrating the unconventional path that brought him to his ideal career.
Journalism to Japanese
Dowdy began college at Bellarmine University studying sports journalism, dreaming of one day covering the Olympics. After his freshman year, he was called on a mission to Japan where, after a devastating earthquake and tsunami, he had the opportunity to contribute to a weeks-long relief effort.
Working with people who had lost everything changed Dowdy’s perspective on life. Suddenly “sports didn’t matter,” he said. “Journalism didn’t matter. Who was going to the College Football Playoff didn’t matter.” What did matter to him were “the people, and I came to love them deeply, and I felt a real purpose—almost like I’d found my calling in life, working in this relief effort.”
Serving in that capacity changed Dowdy’s direction: He transferred to BYU and became a Japanese major, feeling strongly that he needed to find a career path that would allow him to focus more on human connection.
Cultivating a Career
Dowdy continued refining his language skills in the Japanese major, but when he began searching for postgraduation job opportunities, he made an observation: None of the jobs he was interested in required knowing Japanese. He said, “What they cared more about was how the things I learned in my Japanese major could . . . make me a good employee at their company.”
That observation prompted Dowdy to frame his life experiences in a way that highlighted his skillset and what he had learned from his degree. He ended up taking a project manager job at a health care software company, where he found that he was frequently able to use “the cultural empathy skills that I had gained in my major.”
The role required Dowdy to interact with various medical personnel and communicate how his company could help them improve their practices. He would also listen to clients’ frustrations and interpret them for his team. He found this position rewarding because, after working on months-long projects to help his clients, he said, “I would get to hear about or see successes that we had achieved together.”
After a few years in this position, Dowdy found himself facing another turning point. He had always known that he wanted to earn a master’s in business administration (MBA), and the pandemic gave him the opportunity for self-reflection, nudging him in that direction. Once admitted to BYU’s MBA program, Dowdy received a piece of advice from one of his adjunct professors, who reminded him “there [are] a lot of jobs out there. Keep your mind open, keep the door open.” This guidance led Dowdy to stumble upon brand management, which is what he now does for Hershey.
Dowdy’s role requires him to communicate with and coordinate between a variety of teams. He explained that he is responsible for figuring out how everything works together to create the “overall culture, so to speak, or the overall organism of my brand.” He truly enjoys this position, where he says he is working to “build moments of joy” for Hershey customers.
Words of Wisdom
Dowdy feels that all of his experiences prepared him well for his current position. His humanities background helped him become comfortable interacting and empathizing with people, and majoring in Japanese taught him to appreciate other cultures and better relate to them. He recognizes that while his path toward Hershey had many turning points, he didn’t ever feel “rudderless.” Instead, he said, “Every experience [that] I had built me and shaped me and gave me the skills I needed to take on that next opportunity.”
To students searching for their own direction, Dowdy offered this advice: “Stay on your path toward your goal, but be open, if something else comes your way, to shift a little bit.” While reflecting on his experiences, he recognized that his path changed directions quite a few times, and he reminded students that “your path doesn’t have to look exactly the same.” He continued, “I challenge you to think about all the experiences that you’ve had in your life, all the experiences that you will have, and look at how they build. It doesn’t have to be linear . . . and it’s still going to work.”
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