This July, marketing professor and former vice dean of the Fermanian School of Business (FSB) Jamie Hess, DBA, is transitioning into her new role as the dean of the FSB.
To Hess, this next step is a perfect culmination of her time at PLNU. Hess attributes her confidence in this role to working alongside Daniel Bothe, DBA, associate professor of finance, and the former dean of FSB. This year, Bothe decided to step down from his role as dean to return to the classroom.
“One of the things I’m most proud of is that Dan is supportive of me in this role,” Hess said. “My biggest takeaway from working with him is being prepared and making sure that I’m thoughtful and intentional about the things that I do.”
“My life philosophy is to understand as many perspectives that I can before making any type of decision. As the dean, it brings up how I can help all of our faculty be the best they can be as they go into the classroom, to understand more deeply what motivates them.”
With Bothe’s professional background in finance and Hess’ in marketing, the two have crafted not only a dynamic symphony of collaboration but also a tight ship at the FSB.
Now, Hess is ready to set sail.
Sitting on the bookshelf of Hess’ office in the FSB is a list of her top five strengths: input, empathy, connectedness, developer, and learner.
While each serves as a daily reminder, one sticks out in particular for Hess, which she considers her vocation: developer.
Hess has pursued this calling throughout her professional career. After graduating from Florida State University with a degree in public relations and a fine arts minor, she served in various communications, public relations, and marketing roles, all while pursuing her MBA with a concentration in marketing at Palm Beach Atlantic University (PBA).
Before entering the realm of academia, Hess served as the marketing director of the Armory Art Center, a small art school in West Palm Beach, where she developed membership and volunteer programs.
“That was probably my favorite job before now because I really love art,” Hess said. “I got to be involved with living artists, and we brought in artists from across the country to do different workshops. And funnily enough, that kind of led to me teaching.”
When she was working at the Armory Art Center, she saw a job posting for an adjunct professor role at a local community college, which sparked her interest in teaching. A year later, she started to teach marketing and fell in love with sharing experiences from the workplace in the classroom.
After finishing her MBA in 1999, Hess started working as the director of corporate and foundation relations for PBA. With a growing interest in teaching, she started to consider earning her doctorate.
This is when Hess bumped into the dean of the business school at PBA, who offered not just the role of an assistant professor of marketing, but to cover the costs of her doctoral studies. And of course, she said yes.
In 2010, Hess graduated from Nova Southeastern University with a Doctor in Business Administration and a concentration in marketing. By this time, she had also become the undergraduate chair at PBA.
A year later, Hess and her family uprooted from the sunshine state and moved to South Carolina so she could teach marketing at Anderson University; however, the native Floridian yearned for the beach and to return to administrative work.
“It wasn’t until I moved away to South Carolina that I realized how much [the ocean] was part of my identity, and how much I loved being able to look out the window and see the ocean,” Hess said. “There’s something very spiritual and powerful about it to me. I feel this amazing sense of nature and God as being part of the ocean.”
Hess joined the PLNU community in 2013 as a professor of marketing and the associate dean of graduate business education at the FSB. Eight years later, she was named the FSB’s vice dean. In her roles as the associate dean and vice dean, she led the growth of the graduate business programs while teaching undergraduate- and graduate-level marketing courses.
“One of the things that I love about being here is that we are expected to teach our discipline through a lens of Christianity, and in the business school, that really is a focus on ethics and integrity,” Hess said.
The motto of the FSB is “more than the bottom line.” While a company must have a positive bottom line to survive and function, there is also great value in curating environments where employees can live out their purpose.
“We’re having a ripple effect as our students go out and impact their workplaces through a ‘more than the bottom line’ kind of approach to business,” Hess said. “It helps make the world a better place.”
“We’re having a ripple effect as our students go out and impact their workplaces through a ‘more than the bottom line’ kind of approach to business. It helps make the world a better place.”
Hess looks forward to carrying on Bothe’s legacy by establishing deeper connections with the FSB faculty and the school’s business community.
“My life philosophy is to understand as many perspectives that I can before making any type of decision,” Hess said. “As the dean, it brings up how I can help all of our faculty be the best they can be as they go into the classroom, to understand more deeply what motivates them. It’s also getting out there and having conversations with different organizations to find out how we as the business school at Point Loma can best partner with them.”
