Recent Minnesota Carlson graduate Deshaun Ellis began earning his business degree at a small Wisconsin school less than 30 minutes from his hometown. It felt like a safe option for the first-generation college student, especially during a global pandemic.
A year in, he visited a friend attending the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, who took him to the Homecoming football game. Ellis had an epiphany there in the stands, amid a cheering sea of maroon and gold. “I feel like I’m selling myself short if I don’t have an experience that opens me up to a new world,” he realized.
Ellis promptly applied to the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, was accepted, and transferred in fall 2022 to major in marketing and minor in business analytics at Minnesota Carlson.
The change felt right, but it wasn’t easy. Ellis was far from home for the first time in his life, which was just one of many firsts: renting an apartment, buying groceries, managing bills in his name.
“Those were all things I was learning, on top of going to a school that was a lot more academically challenging than what I was used to,” he says. “It really rattled me.”
By the end of that September, he hit a breaking point. Ellis reached out to his advisor, Anny Lin, for what ended up being a “life-changing” phone call that kicked off a flurry of Carlson connections.
He draws a line, albeit not a straight one, from that phone call to the moment a year later when he got word that he’d snagged his dream pipeline internship on the Procter & Gamble sales team. Ellis immediately called Lin to share the good news.
A world of opportunities
The internship experience at first mirrored his initial time at Carlson, as he navigated the corporate world among second- and third-generation Procter & Gamble employees, with business travel, a company credit card, and delivering sales presentations to company leaders.
“Two years prior, just signing a $7-a-month housing insurance contract under my name was intimidating. And now, it’s this?” he says of the whirlwind experience.
During his ten-week stint, Ellis drew on the hard skills he learned in class and folded in soft skills he soaked up as he worked to land the job offer. This time, his first phone call was to his grandparents, who supported him in what felt like a big risk that was finally paying off. Ellis was set to begin his new adventure as a Procter & Gamble account executive after graduation in the spring.
In addition to his studies, Ellis was a Carlson Ambassador, leading campus tours for prospective students and their families. In that role he liked to point out the office tower where he worked—among the tallest in the Minneapolis skyline.
“There’s no growth in the comfort zone, and there’s no comfort in the growth zone,” he would tell them. “When I came here, going from not knowing what the heck I was doing to working in a building where you can look out and see the entire Twin Cities, it felt like a story.”
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