Helping people, doing good
February 14, 2024
From student support to side hustles, Brittani Harris MS'23 is using her GPS degree to bring good to the world.
Brittani Harris MS'23 has always had a passion for helping others. After finishing her undergraduate degree in 2014, Brittani felt sure that she’d pursue a career in social work. Filled with ambition and a desire to do good, she jumped straight into the Americorps, serving the Roxbury community for a year and a half before taking on a role at a scattered site shelter in the Boston area.
However, though Brittani loved the hands-on, community-oriented work that came with these high-intensity roles, after five and a half years, she found her career goals starting to shift.
“I had a lot of positive experiences and I had really felt like I ‘did good,’” Brittani told GPS, “I [had] learned so much … And I felt like I could effect change somewhere else.”
Although her current role as senior assistant director of Academic Experiential Learning at the Brandeis International Business School may be different from her previous work, Brittani is still finding ways to make a positive social impact — and her GPS degree is aiding in her efforts.
When Brittani first started at the business school, her job was mainly to support students. Now, her role has expanded to encompass the field projects program — a program that connects students with businesses so that they can put their classroom skills to practical use.
While empowering students to help others has been an incredibly rewarding part of Brittani’s role, her interactions with companies have had an even greater impact on her career journey. After all, it was businesses’ need for digital marketing skills that sparked her interest in pursuing an M.S. in Digital Marketing and Design at Brandeis GPS.
“A lot of what these companies [ask] for help with is business strategy or sort of taking the next step in their business, especially if it's a startup,” Brittani told GPS. “A lot of that happens to entail digital marketing and program execution. And so I said, ‘Well, it seems like I should move in that direction because it is such a need and such a growing field.”
Brittani chose the Digital Marketing and Design program because she felt it would maximize her ability to make an impact. This turned out to be true in a multitude of ways. Not only has Brittani’s new expertise in digital marketing increased her ability to help students and businesses in her day-to-day job, but it has given her a deeper understanding of the world around her.
“Every single course I took … impacted my life immediately and directly, because advertising marketing is all around us,” Brittani says. “Every time I see a commercial now, I know exactly why they [made the decisions they made]. It’s so cool to be able to critically pick apart the world around you.”
But out of all of the benefits Brittani’s degree has had on her life, perhaps the most meaningful has been its contributions to her side hustle: a small business called Boundless Good Co.
The origins of Boundless Good Co. date back to 2020, when Brittani — a certified yoga instructor — decided to create a virtual yoga platform during the COVID-19 pandemic. What started as a way to keep the community together slowly transformed into a business dedicated to yoga’s tenet of “doing good,” with the small group raising over $8000 for nonprofits and grassroots organizations over three years.
When yoga studios began to open up again, Brittani did not want to lose the connections that had been forged during this time — so she used her newly earned digital marketing skills to create an offshoot of the yoga platform: Boundless Good Co. To continue doing good, Brittani and her yoga community now collect jars that are upcycled into containers for homemade soy candles.
“It's been really cool to keep community through that, and to grow community through [the process of] bringing self-care into people's lives,” Brittani told GPS. “But I wouldn't have been able to do any of that if my branding wasn't on par with others.”
“Community” is something that comes to mind as Brittani reflects on her experience at GPS as well. “When you take an online degree you have to work a little harder to create your own community, but it's so important,” Brittani says. “The best courses I had throughout my program were the ones where some of us got together and were like, ‘Hey, let's have a group chat,’ or ‘Let's connect on LinkedIn so that we can stay in touch with each other.’” She encourages current and prospective students to take advantage of the networking opportunities that GPS can provide — even if it seems like you’re too busy to build those connections.
As a recent graduate, Brittani is unsure what other changes her GPS education will bring. But one thing is for certain: Brittani will use her degree to do good, no matter where the future takes her.
To learn more about the online M.S. in Digital Marketing and Design, please visit our website.