Point and click your TV remote at random and chances are you might spot an LAS alum on the small screen.
Within the span of a single month, an LAS graduate tested her business know-how on Donald Trump's reality show, The Apprentice, a second alumnus landed on Fiji as a Survivor contestant, and yet another grad saw her Doritos commercial unveiled in front of a Super Bowl television audience of 93.2 million-the third-largest audience in TV history, according to the NFL.
Aimee Trottier, a 1996 graduate in speech communication from Elmhurst, Ill., was one of 18 contestants selected for The Apprentice from a reported 210,000 people. She also survived six weeks on the show, which pits two teams against each other in a different entrepreneurial contest every week. As one example, the teams designed a line of bathing suits and organized and ran a fashion show-all in two days.
After each contest, the team that makes the least money loses a player. And in the sixth week, aired on February 18, Trottier was dismissed by real estate magnate Trump with the show's trademark line, "You're fired."
But Trottier remains positive. "The experience was amazing," she says. "It gave me an opportunity to speak to legends in business, and I made phenomenal friends."
After being eliminated, Trottier was sequestered with other fired contestants until filming wrapped up. But during this time, the show treated them to trips to baseball games and Catalina Island, tennis lessons, and time on the beach. As a reward following one of her team's victories, she even got a chance to play basketball with several Los Angeles Lakers, including Kareem Abdul Jabbar and former Illini star Brian Cook.
"I had my five seconds as a D-list celebrity," Trottier points out.
The toughest episode to watch came in week five-the first of two weeks in which she served as her team's project manager. She says some "creative editing" made her appear foolish and incompetent.
But according to Trottier, she was proud that she maintained her integrity through the process and didn't stoop to backstabbing and cheating to win.
"What I learned is that I can remain positive and remain myself despite some challenging circumstances," she says. "The first thing I did when I was fired was call my parents and thank them for all they had taught me."
On Survivor, meanwhile, Mookie Lee, a 2003 LAS graduate in actuarial science, has survived three weeks on the granddaddy of reality shows. However, his Ravu tribe is struggling, having lost all three "challenges"-contests between the show's two tribes. The losing tribe must vote one member off the show at the end of each episode.
Although Lee has made it so far, his team is in tatters. And to make matters worse, the winning tribe lives a cushy life on a beach well-stocked with food, while the losers are stuck on a desolate beach trying to lick moisture from leaves.
For Kristin Dehnert, a 1991 LAS graduate in speech communication, her experience has gone a bit smoother. Dehnert wrote and directed a commercial that was chosen from more than 1,000 entries as one of five finalists in Doritos' "Crash the Super Bowl" contest. Online voting would then decide which Doritos commercial aired during the first quarter of the Super Bowl.
Dehnert says her nerves didn't set in until Super Bowl Sunday. After Doritos flew the five finalists to Miami, the company hosted a lavish Super Bowl viewing party for them. And when the winning commercial was about to be aired, she says they had cameras aimed at them to catch their reaction.
When Dehnert saw that her commercial hadn't come out on top, she took it in stride, telling herself the experience had been "a blast." But that's when a Doritos executive made a surprise announcement. Because the online voting had been so close and the quality so high, they decided to air another commercial during the second quarter.
"So I was back on the edge of my seat, and I spent the next 20 minutes calling friends and telling them to keep watching," says Dehnert. A little while later, when she heard the first line of her "Check Out Girl" commercial, she says, "It felt like my heart flew out of my body."
Her commercial had made it to the Super Bowl.
What's more, IAG Research, which tracks Super Bowl commercials, reported that "Check Out Girl" was tied as the fourth most-liked Super Bowl commercial and ranked third among ads that gave the biggest boost to viewers' opinion of the brand.
To top it off, Dehnert says the "Crash the Super Bowl" contest has done wonders for her professionally. She has already received a few offers from production companies to sign on as a commercial director.
And as she puts it, "That's priceless."
