A Realistic Dreamer: From the Stage to the Classroom
By Becca Broaddus
Brenna Haffey doesn’t know what she wants to be when she grows up. She has a lot of options: music, business, healthcare or maybe another industry she hasn’t thought of yet.
“I like to consider myself a realistic dreamer, so I’m not going to put all of my eggs in one basket,” she said. “I like to be prepared, but I am very motivated and driven. I know where my future leads me will be right for me, and I’ll do really well and excel in it, just because that’s the nature of my go-getter personality.”
The junior Baylor Business Fellows student is majoring in Marketing and Business Spanish with a minor in Chinese. She is also a professional singer.
Even her pauses of “um” and “uh” sound musical as she lists some of the accomplishments of her 21 years. She gets her musical propensity naturally, her parents met in a rock band in New York City, before later leaving for her mother to pursue a medical career in Houston. Music is a big part of her life. She started singing her original songs at open mic nights in Houston at 15, escorted by her father—sometimes singing at as many as three venues a night.
“Music exemplifies what it means to be diligent in pursuing a long-term goal because it’s a long-term commitment that you address every single day,” she said. “I kind of treat my music as a business, which is why I think I’ve been so successful with it.”
In addition to her solo career, she sings in Bella Voce, a highly select women’s ensemble comprised primarily of music majors at Baylor. But that’s not her only extracurricular activity. The trilingual junior is active in the Baylor hip hop dance club Poppers, Lockers & Breakers, Delta Sigma Pi professional business fraternity and business student organization Phi Beta Lambda. Not to mention she plays piano, bass and guitar, powerlifts, is a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo, and is writing a book. (No, she doesn’t have a Netflix account.)
She admits she puts a lot of pressure on herself, but she loves every activity in which she’s involved right now.
“Everything I’m involved in, I want to be involved in, and I love so much,” she said. “Because now I know what that’s like, that’s what I’m going to pursue in my future. I don’t know what it’ll be that I do, but I know it’s going to be something that’s very tailored to the kind of person I am… Whatever my future career will be, I envision it being a position that’s not created yet. I feel like whatever I end up doing is going to be a position that I create or something that I make, because it’s going to be something that doesn’t already exist. I’m going to forge my way into doing whatever I want to do.”
Right now, that’s interning at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC) Consulting this summer. But from there, your guess is as good as Brenna’s. She may take a year off after graduation to focus on her music, get a graduate degree, or maybe her internship will open up new opportunities. She will figure it out when she gets there.
Baylor Business Review, Spring 2017