{"id":1281,"date":"2025-09-23T13:17:44","date_gmt":"2025-09-23T13:17:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/?p=1281"},"modified":"2025-09-23T13:17:44","modified_gmt":"2025-09-23T13:17:44","slug":"stay-curious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/2025\/09\/23\/stay-curious\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Stay curious\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"
When Christina Clarke was choosing a program to earn her doctorate, she did some pretty thorough research.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s not the kind of person to waste a good opportunity, and her resum\u00e9 is proof. Currently the chief marketing officer at Sport Clips Haircuts, she\u2019s already led marketing teams at fast-growing companies like Raising Cane\u2019s and Wingstop, after spending some exciting years at Frito-Lay and Pizza Hut.<\/p>\n

So when she knew the moment was right to go back to school \u2014 a time when her kids were grown but without their own children yet, and her parents doing well \u2014 she knew she wanted to further her education with a valuable degree from a well-structured program.<\/p>\n

\n\tYou get your bachelor\u2019s degree, really, for your family. You get your master\u2019s for your employer. This one\u2019s for me. <\/span>\n\n\t\t\t- Christina Clarke, DBA Class of 2026<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n

And she chose the DBA program at Marshall University.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s interesting,\u201d said Clarke, a first-generation college student who grew up in Arizona and now lives in Texas. \u201cYou get your bachelor\u2019s degree, really, for your family. \u2026 You get your master\u2019s for your employer. This one\u2019s for me. This one is going in, learning as much as I can and staying as sharp as I can.\u201d<\/p>\n

She hopes to lead a company herself someday, and this program is helping prepare her for that, as well as preparing her for yet another chapter farther down the road.<\/p>\n

\u201cI know eventually, when corporate is done with me, I can\u2019t sit still and the thought of retiring and being stagnant is terrible,\u201d she said. \u201cSo the opportunity of being able to teach later is important.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s now in a cohort of 12 students from around the country earning her Doctor of Business Administration from Marshall, with plans to graduate in 2026. It\u2019s a hybrid program with online and in-person learning experiences that she says suit her perfectly.<\/p>\n

She tracked down students in the cohort before hers to get their thoughts about Marshall\u2019s approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat really, really attracted me was the openness of the program in the sense that, very much like a business environment, you might have the way which you plan to approach it, but you\u2019re willing make adjustments as you go along without breaking the integrity of the program,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She expressed appreciation for faculty members like Dr. Susan Lanham and others, and for director Dr. Ralph McKinney, as well as her cohort, which includes classmates from states including Ohio, Kentucky, Utah and Virginia, as well as herself, a Texan, and others.<\/p>\n

\n\t I feel like if I could start a DBA sorority, I would.<\/span>\n\n\t\t\t- Christina Clarke, DBA Class of 2026<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n\n

\u201cMy cohort is incredibly great. We have four women in the cohort out of 12 \u2013 those are my sisters in crime,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

For her, it\u2019s just another important step in a career that started as a shift manager at Taco Bell, where her boss pointed out that if she went into the salary manager program, Pepsi would pay for 90% of the cost of earning her undergraduate degree at Arizona State. That\u2019s what she did, and eventually earned her master\u2019s at the University of Phoenix.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, she was learning the craft of marketing. She really dove in at Pizza Hut, then transitioning to the ad agency Euro RSCG and then Frito-Lay, where she worked for 12 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI did a variety of different roles, from traditional brand, like Cheetos, to working with customers like Walmart,\u201d Clarke said. \u201cMy last role was marketing strategy portfolio and partnerships. So anything that you saw for the Super Bowl, that was my team. If you saw NFL ads, that was my team. That was a fabulous, incredible role. I think we had 90 partners, including leagues, teams, athletes and music artists.\u201d<\/p>\n

She knew that if she was going to leave, it was to get back into the fast-paced world of food service, so when Wingstop called and asked her to fill their vice president of marketing role, she did, and was quickly promoted to CMO.<\/p>\n

She later took some time off to care for her husband, who had been diagnosed with cancer, but when he was back on his feet, she joined Raising Cane\u2019s. Just this year, she joined Sport Clips, a haircut franchise with a sports-themed environment, where she oversees marketing, communications, partnerships and philanthropic efforts, supporting 1,850 locations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love brands that are very clear on who they are,\u201d she said. \u201cSport Clips is obviously one of those, very much focused on men and boys. They are founder-started, second-generation, transitioning. The son has taken it over five years ago, so that\u2019s always a fabulous time to craft the next chapter of a story. I think they have so much untapped potential, and candidly, I just really like the people, which makes a really big difference.\u201d<\/p>\n

In marketing, you\u2019re always in the people business, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is constantly evolving and changing, and I like that,\u201d she said. \u201cIt also allows me to be very curious at the same time. There\u2019s a little bit of gratification in the sense that you make somebody\u2019s life a little bit easier or better, or they feel good about themselves at the end of the day.\u201d<\/p>\n

If she has advice, it\u2019s to stay curious and remember you don\u2019t have all the answers all the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cBeing willing to say, \u2018I don\u2019t understand that,\u2019 is very powerful,\u201d she said. \u201cIt seems like it wouldn\u2019t be, because you\u2019re admitting that you don\u2019t know, but at the end, it really is because you\u2019re allowing yourself the ability to understand and be able to grow at the same time.\u201d<\/p>\n

She\u2019s enjoyed the process of growing through the DBA program at Marshall. As someone who worked her way through her undergraduate and graduate programs, she remembers being so busy with work that she didn\u2019t form a lot of college connections. Being at Marshall has been different.<\/p>\n

\u201cBen Eng has been great about pulling us together (to feel like we\u2019re part of Marshall),\u201d she said. \u201cI feel like if I could start a DBA sorority, I would. It\u2019s actually kind of fun because I have more Marshall gear than I do anything else.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Christina Clarke was choosing a program to earn her doctorate, she did some pretty thorough research. She\u2019s not the kind of person to waste a good opportunity, and her resum\u00e9 is proof. Currently the chief marketing officer at Sport Clips Haircuts, she\u2019s already led marketing teams at fast-growing companies like Raising Cane\u2019s and Wingstop, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":198,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moments"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/198"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1281"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1285,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1281\/revisions\/1285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marshall.edu\/moments\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}