For Davy, block plan started it all

When Kyle Davy ’11 talks about his Cornell experience, it all comes down to the block plan.  

“I attribute many of my successes to the opportunities One Course At A Time gave me,” he says.

Davy is the chief revenue officer for the Iowa Energy professional basketball team in Des Moines, Iowa. He took full advantage of the block plan at Cornell, and has built his career on a combination of that foundation and his personal interests.

Davy came to Cornell from St. Paul, Minnesota, on a piano scholarship and majored in economics and business, with a minor in music. He also played golf for the Rams, which led to his first experiential learning opportunity as a development intern for the Greater Cedar Rapids Golf Tournament.

His second opportunity arose when his music minor led to an appointment as the Vermund & Vargas Fellow in Nonprofit Administration with Orchestra Iowa in Cedar Rapids, where he says he learned how to make sales calls.

“I used what I learned with the orchestra to make a successful application for my third real-world experience, the Dallas Cowboys,” he says. He had made a connection with the Cowboys during Professor Jerry Savitsky’s course Economics of Sport, when the class traveled to Dallas and met with representatives of the city’s professional teams. Davy’s Cornell Fellowship there, where he met mentor Eric Sudol ’03,  introduced him to the big leagues.

“Major league sports is a business and much of the enterprise is dedicated to driving revenue,” he says.

His next internship was a logical progression from his previous experiences. In the spring of 2011 he worked for the Iowa Cubs. Again, he used the block plan to his advantage, having arranged his courses so as to have only one left to complete during the spring of his senior year.

He joined the Energy in the fall of 2011 as a sales representative. Since then, he’s been promoted four times. Davy’s time on campus was a balance between coursework, experiential learning, and music. He participated in the Pandemonium steel drum band and played piano with the jazz band and the pit orchestra.

Shortly after graduation he was named a young trustee of the college, which he describes as “one of the best experiences of my postgraduate life. It helped me stay connected to Cornell and to get involved on the business side. All the trustees are very welcoming to the young trustees.”

In the end, One Course At A Time even provided a skill set that Davy uses in his day-to-day work.

“The biggest thing about One Course is how applicable it is to the real world,” Davy says. “Projects are focused on smaller periods of time, like a block. The skills I learned in order to deal with blocks are skills I use every day.”