Alumni Spotlight: Whitney Brandon Faulkner
CCPA alum Whitney Brandon Faulkner (B.A. '03) shares how she leveraged her degree to carve out a unique career for herself with the Dallas Cowboys Football Club.
Whitney Brandon Faulkner (B.A. ’03) is this week’s featured alum in our new Alumni Spotlight series for the This Week at Meadows e-newsletter. Each week, a different Meadows alum will be highlighted for their accomplishments post-graduation.
As a student at Meadows, Whitney Brandon Faulkner was no stranger to hard work and hustling. She spent her college career balancing her degree with a full-time internship with the Dallas Cowboys Football Club. She arranged her class schedule around her full-time work hours and dedicated herself fully to both pursuits for three years, ultimately graduating with a degree in Corporate Communications & Public Affairs (CCPA) and an official job offer from the Dallas Cowboys.
“My time on the Hilltop really honed my communication and writing skills and the courses taught provided real-world application, reaffirming the career choices I was making,” shares Faulkner, who believes the things learned during her time in CCPA directly correlated with skills needed for her full-time job. “Some of my professors even let me turn in items from work for class assignments.”
Faulkner has carved out a unique role at the Dallas Cowboys Football Club as their PR & Community Relations Programs Manager, which entails assisting with media relations and access to the team by local news outlets as well as implementing outreach and philanthropy programing for the club’s charitable foundation. While on the surface the two roles may seem quite different, but Faulkner has found they play off each other very easily.
“My PR skills offer the community side of my job the freedom to draft and distribute news regarding the good work being done by the team without a middleman,” she explains. “On the flip side, my community work offers greater knowledge of newsworthy notes about players, programs and more when forming relationships with local media.”
The relationships Faulkner formed while at SMU have proven to be invaluable throughout her 24-year career. In addition to networking, volunteering, shadowing, and interning are all ways to take advantage of the opportunities available to you through Meadows and can be the thing that gets your foot in the door of your chosen industry, before and after graduation.
“Once you graduate, you are part of a very exclusive club that continues to support and engage with each other and that is a special thing to be a part of.”