Jennifer Choi ’08 Has Dream Job as NBA Hawks’ “Swiss Army Knife”

“If you had told me during my time at ILR that I would one day be working for an NBA team, I would have laughed in disbelief,” said Jennifer Choi ’08 from her office at Centennial Tower, across from State Farm Arena, the home court of the Atlanta Hawks.

“Although I grew up as a sports fan, I never considered sports as a viable career path,” she reflected. “When I consider my position today with the Atlanta Hawks, I sometimes am in disbelief – I genuinely believe I’ve landed my dream job. It’s something few people can claim with complete sincerity, but I can, and ILR played an instrumental role in making this journey possible.”

Choi, a first-generation Korean American, found Cornell thanks to an uncle who attended the university in the early ’80s. Like many ILRies, she came to the school expecting to become a lawyer. However, after arriving on East Hill, she became increasingly drawn to courses about organizational behavior, human capital management and collective bargaining.

As a senior, Choi spent a semester participating in the ILR Credit Internship Program, an opportunity for ILR juniors and seniors to gain professional experience while also receiving a full semester’s credit. Choi undertook a paid internship in New York City with Morgan Stanley, while also meeting and working with other ILR interns and faculty in New York.

“The credit internship was very valuable – it gave me time to apply what I learned at ILR while also refining my professional skills in a real-world setting. I was asked to craft presentations, work with business partners across the company and deliver outside of my comfort zone. And I think it was an immensely helpful step before entering the workforce.”

After graduation, Choi worked in management and strategy consulting before beginning a job with an internal consulting group at American Express. Six months into that position, she got laid off and viewed it as an opportunity to pivot her career.

“The tech space was booming,” Choi said. “Seeing the rapid growth of mobile, I knew I wanted to jump on that ship.”

Choi spent the next several years as a product manager at American Express, where she helped launch its first mobile app for corporate card members. After that, she spent time at McKinsey & Company, serving as the head of product development in its New Ventures Group, and was nine months into a new job at Dropbox when she saw an intriguing opportunity.

It was a job description for the newly created director of innovation position at the Atlanta Hawks.

“The job was nothing I’d ever heard of before, but when I looked and saw what it comprised, I thought, ‘I could do this,’” Choi said.

She submitted her resume online, thinking, “It was going to the black hole of resume submissions,” but soon after, she received a call from the organization and a month later, she moved to Atlanta.

A new job. A new state. A new beginning.

Little did Choi know that the most significant transition was still to come. Six months into her new position, the COVID-19 virus hit and shuttered the NBA in the middle of the season.

“There was tremendous uncertainty about our path forward,” Choi said. “With NBA games suspended, COVID restrictions in place and the backdrop of an election year, we found ourselves asking, ‘What can we do? How can we help?’ We’ve always considered ourselves a civic asset that belongs to the city of Atlanta, so we made the decision to double down on community engagement. During that time, we like to say that we weren’t on the court, we were in the streets of Atlanta.”

The Hawks turned their focus to the 2020 general election.

“I think it’s the thing that I am most proud of, both personally and professionally,” Choi said. “We opened our doors to 40,000-plus voters, and we turned our arena into a mega-voting center during the early voting period. We focused on getting people in quickly, providing a clean and safe environment, and adding a dose of our hospitality.”

Choi was a member of the 16-person team that led that initiative to transform State Farm Arena into the largest voting center in Georgia history. They were deputized at the county level, and for three weeks, from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. daily, they managed the polls and kept all the necessary records to ensure compliance with electoral regulations.

“The entire organization – from our head coach to our mascot to our senior executives – we all stopped doing work for those few weeks, and we just focused on ensuring the people of Atlanta had fair and equitable access to the ballot during a very challenging time.

“And we made it fun. We had our cheerleaders out there. We made our own ‘I voted’ stickers. We had ‘Future Voter’ stickers for kids accompanying their parents. We wanted to infuse the process with our signature hospitality so people would leave with a genuinely positive memory of the experience. This is what we do for our Atlanta Hawks fans every game.”

In her early days with the Hawks, Choi started the Hawks’ Innovation Lab, a dual incubator/accelerator that aimed to test new ideas and concepts that they believed could be the future of the business. This included testing wearables, launching NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and finding ways to innovate and improve their own employee experience and culture.

Since then, Choi has worked on special projects and strategic initiatives before morphing into a new role in which she focuses on driving the organization’s live event profitability and revenue business operations.

“I’ve really had so many different hats at the Hawks,” Choi said. “I think given the breadth of my experience and skills, they have been able to create bespoke roles for me that align with the organization’s needs and my capabilities.

“The organizational behavior principles I learned at ILR have been absolutely fundamental to my success.”

“They provided me with the keys to understand team dynamics, culture, and how high-functioning teams should operate. This knowledge was valuable especially as someone who entered the sports industry as an outsider. There aren’t many generalists like me working in professional sports.

“I’ve essentially become a Swiss Army knife for the organization – adaptable, versatile and ready to address whatever challenges arise.”