Kendi Bawah ’25

Kendi Bawah grew up in the Philadelphia area. She was in elementary school when her family moved to Ghana, and her parents always had in mind that she would return to the U.S. for her education.

After earning her undergrad degree in Ghana and then working a variety of marketing roles there, Bawah set her sights on LeBow. She wanted a masters in marketing, not an MBA, and she wanted to study in person rather than virtually. LeBow checked all those boxes.

More than this, though, she was drawn by the opportunities for experiential learning. “That was the main thing that caught my attention,” she said. At other schools, internships were an afterthought, “but then I looked at Drexel's marketing program and I saw that experiential learning was required.

She applied to a handful of schools and got into all of them, but LeBow was the obvious choice. As she worked toward the master’s degree, Bawah discovered that marketing went a lot deeper than she had previously understood. Of course there’s the storytelling aspect, positioning the brand in a certain light. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

“Marketing involves a lot of research. You need to do focus groups, you need to have conversations with your audience and know what they want, what they like, what they're realizing and not realizing,” she said.

This came as a surprise. “Here's me thinking marketing is all about strategy, branding, theory,” she said. “And then my first required class is a statistics class, and it was a make-or-break moment.”

She’d never much cared for math and had avoided the MBS in part to dodge the ‘numbers’ part. Spoiler alert: She nailed it. In fact, Bawah graduated with a 4.00 GPA and received the Graduate Academic Excellence Award, presented to the graduate student who has achieved high academic accomplishments at LeBow and beyond.

She entered the statistics class “not knowing how to use any of these tools,” she said. And while she worked hard to make the grade, “I would also give a shout-out to my professor, Matthew Schneider, because he was great. It's still not my favorite thing to do, but I can confidently say that I conquered it.”

There were other pivotal moments. “A marketing research class was also very impactful in helping me see that marketing is much broader than most people think,” she says. “It’s not all about social media and just posting on Instagram. It goes deeper.”

LeBow’s deep drive into the numbers, the research, the behind-the-scene things that make marketing work — all of that gave Bawah a professional boost. “It definitely made me understand marketing differently,” she says — and that in turn helped her land her present job.

As marketing manager at food-service giant Aramark, she’s helping ensure schoolchildren enjoy meals that are delicious and nutritious.

Bawah came to LeBow in part for the experiential learning, and the school delivered there as well. She did an internship at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, a role where she came to see through a very different lens. Being on the job for year-end financial reporting, she says, "helped me to see how companies close their books, how they do their final checks and balances."

“The average marketing person wouldn’t understand how to build a budget, but then every company has a marketing budget. It was good to get an experience of how all that works."

As she reflects back on her LeBow experience, Bawah gives a special nod to Brian Ellis, PhD, associate dean for academic programs administration.

“I met him on my first day on campus, and throughout my program he was a very insightful and helpful person,” she said. “Drexel isn’t just about the in-class work. It’s about building yourself as a person in your career. Meeting people, getting involved — all that is an important part of the experience.”