PEOPLE
Alum Trades Baking for Academia and Makes Giving Back a Key Ingredient
Dr. Samantha Cross dreamt of becoming a French-trained pastry chef and opening a beachside café in the Caribbean. Her passion for baking remains, but her life has taken a far different path. This Cave Hill alumna is now fully glazed in academia. B ased in the United States, the Fulbright Scholar is Associate Professor of Marketing in the Debbie and Jerry Ivy College of Business at Iowa State University where she is the only tenure-track, black, female professor in the college. With consumer behaviour as her area of specialisation, she examines family decision making, binational families, cultural and sensory influences on consumption, using qualitative and mixed methods approaches. Her exploration of these issues has earned her numerous awards. Despite these achievements, or rather, due to her success, Dr. Cross is committed to giving back. “I always say I’ve been very fortunate.
university’s newly opened International Business Center and the first business student to volunteer at the university’s Writing Center. According to Dr. Cross, as a business student, she was an anomaly at the time since students in that area of specialisation were not known to have strong writing skills. She credits this to her education at Queen’s College and Cave Hill. After graduating, she worked for around 10 years in different companies before deciding to return to school for her PhD. Her decision was cemented when a former professor pointed out the shortage of business school professors in the country. To help her along that part of her journey, she reached out to The PhD Projec t, an organisation that promotes diversity in the
I’ve had lots of amazing opportunities, and as the saying goes, with great privilege comes great responsibility.” Dr. Cross was born in the United Kingdom (UK) to a Barbadian father and a Trinidadian mother. Her early years were spent in Trinidad before her family moved to Barbados when she was six years old. She attended Queen’s College and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in Management Studies at Cave Hill in 1993. Though she planned to continue her studies in the UK, she received an offer she could not refuse from DePaul University in Chicago to undertake the Master of Business Administration degree. It was a time of firsts for Cross: She was the first graduate assistant at the
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