Farm work ethic, CBA degree
prepare top student for career at John Deere

‘I know I’ll only find fulfillment in helping people who are helping others, like farmers’

Marketing and logistics management major Jennifer Smith, ’05, learned the value of hard work on her family’s dairy farm. She awoke at 4:15 a.m. to milk the cows with her father, helped her grandmother toss hay bales to the calves, and experienced the satisfaction of a job well-done while the rest of the world slept.

“The farm gave me a sense of pride. Other farms have struggled, but we have managed to sustain with everybody pitching in,” Smith said.
Located six miles north of Fremont, Michigan, the Smith’s century-old dairy farm has sustained itself on the kind of high standards that Smith herself aspires to, and it instilled in her the kind of values that set her apart.

“Jennifer is very intuitive, very bright, and she has tremendous ability, but she is basing her career on how she can help other people, not on how much money she can make,” said Robert Cook, Central Michigan University marketing and logistics professor. “I think that’s what defines her most.”

John Deere internship – naturally

Smith’s glimpse into what her future might hold began last year in Des Moines, Iowa, with an internship at John Deere, a company she has believed in her whole life. As her mother puts it, “we only use John Deere equipment.”

During the internship she interviewed farmers for a research project designed to understand their purchase motives and criteria in terms of emerging farm technology – like GPS and tools to monitor crop yields.

“It’s a great honor to represent the business college as student of the year, but honors and personal glory don’t drive me. I know I’ll only find fulfillment in helping people who are helping others, like farmers, who feed the nation,” Smith said.

A semester abroad to expand horizons
Farm life didn’t allow for much travel, so Smith took advantage of CMU’s study abroad program in Spain and spring break mission trips. In particular, she remembers spending time with the people in the Tennessee mountains, parsing country music lyrics (“You’ve got to stand for something or you’ll fall for anything.”) with the locals.

“It humbles you to see what they have and how totally happy they are,” Smith said. “It made me see how I need to make use of the opportunities I’ve been given in a positive way.”

A John Deere position – just for Jennifer
In January Smith interviewed with John Deere for a job. Because she wasn’t the best fit for the original opening they had, their sales and marketing departments got together to find a position that better suited her – pricing analyst in the marketing department.

“It’s pretty amazing that a Fortune 500 company would do that,” Cook said.

Jennifer remembers long summer nights on the farm waiting for her father to finish his day’s work so the family could sit down to a late dinner. As she begins her career at John Deere, she’ll have the chance to help people like her father, and that’s important to Smith because, for her, farming isn’t a job – it’s a way of life.

Jennifer Smith, in orange, and a team of CBA students work on their final logistics project with help from marketing and logistics management professor Robert Cook.

Smith gets a chance to try out some John Deere construction equipment during her internship there last summer. While there, she also researched different aspects of new technology products and helped develop marketing plans for the company.

Smith both improved her Spanish and learned about a different way of life while studying abroad in Segovia, Spain.

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