Our PEOPLE
Ben Bailey was the first student to complete all parts of the Shackouls Honors College’s Cursus Honorum curriculum.
THE BUSINESS OF GRATITUDE Student experiences translate into professional success for MSU alumnus
B
By Sasha Steinberg, Photo by Beth Wynn
en Bailey is a firm believer that new technology opens the door to new opportunities to solve new problems in new ways. The Starkville native said he explored this concept as a Mississippi State student, and those lessons prepared him for his current role as manager of content marketing for one of the world’s leading software companies. Bailey works for Frame.io, a video review and collaboration platform designed to help creative teams work together securely and in real-time from anywhere in the world. He said he enjoys “wearing a lot of hats,” from working on the company’s industry publication and automation projects to helping internal departments tell technical stories of all kinds. “Frame.io is the perfect intersection of all of my professional and creative interests—technology, cinema, filmmaking, storytelling, incredible design, and attention to detail and quality,” Bailey said. “It is fortune and providence that the opportunity to work here opened up to me, and I’m incredibly grateful that it did.” Bailey joined Frame.io in 2018, fresh out of graduate school at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he earned a Master of Divinity in ethics. Nine years prior, he was a bright-eyed Mississippi State freshman, hungry for opportunities to explore his interests in international culture, language, business and problem solving. He found just what he was looking for in MSU’s College of Business. “Pursuing a management major in the international business program was a natural melding of those two interests,” said Bailey, who also earned bachelor’s degrees in foreign language and philosophy/religion. “Dr. Allison Pearson and Dr. Melissa Moore were really good at teaching concepts, making lessons memorable and bringing up case studies to flesh out what we were talking about,” he said. “Dr. Jon Rezek was tenacious in the way he helped students with what they wanted to accomplish.” Bailey was an early member of the university’s entrepreneurship club and received support from the Entrepreneurship Center Advisory Board to start a video production business while an MSU student. Now living
38
WINTER 2021
some 1,000 miles away, he serves as a member of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Outreach’s Peer Review Entrepreneurship Panel, advising current students eager to create their own startups. “Becoming an entrepreneur or being involved with entrepreneurs allows you to do things that you couldn’t have imagined. I never would have imagined that by the time I was 31, I would be at this stage of my career, running a sizeable team at a major company,” Bailey said. “My involvement with the E-Center taught me it’s OK to fail and to keep looking for that pathway to success.” Bailey attributes his open mindedness as a young entrepreneur to his student years in MSU’s Lab Rats Comedy troupe. “I never would have guessed how relevant the skills of improv are in the professional world,” Bailey said. “Lab Rats taught me how to think fast on my feet and adapt to new scenarios, and that has been super helpful to me. Being able to iterate, learn new things and take correction from other people who know a lot more than you is important.” Bailey said he also highly recommends for current students to consider the Shackouls Honors College’s University of Oxford study abroad program, as well as the college’s Cursus Honorum curriculum. He said studying abroad taught him the importance of “discovering what other people have done, what they can do, who they are and how they live.” “There’s nothing that can prepare you for the future in a rapidly changing world quite like a genuine, humane education,” he said. “Learning how to ask questions, look for deeper insight, and use reason, logic and rhetoric to explore new ideas—that was by far the most beneficial part of my MSU experience.” His parting advice to current students and soon-tobe-graduates? “Drink the chocolate milk in Perry cafeteria. Every time I think about it, I regret not having it at every meal,” he said with a laugh. “I’m serious; you will regret it. You will turn 30 and will say, ‘Why didn’t I drink the chocolate milk? It was free, it was there, and it was delicious.’” n
