While earning her MBA from Gies College of Business, Olivia Butrymovich (MBA ’26) found herself juggling coursework with the demands of hosting world-class ski events that attract elite athletes and global sports journalists.
“I love my job and I love where I live, and I didn’t want to sacrifice that to go back to school,” said Butrymovich, the communications and philanthropy manager at Copper Mountain Resort in Colorado. “The Gies iMBA program was affordable, flexible, and a realistic fit for my life.”
In just the past year, Butrymovich and her team hosted three World Cup events, a Red Bull shoot with Lindsey Vonn, a commercial shoot with FOX, and a ski day for young girls with World Cup gold medalist and Olympic champion Mikaela Shiffrin.
Butrymovich grew up in a small mountain town not far from Copper Mountain, where both of her parents worked at a local ski resort. She earned her undergraduate degree in journalism and political science from the University of Colorado Boulder and discovered her interest in public relations during an internship on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. Those skills made her an attractive candidate for Copper Mountain, which hired her as a communications coordinator in 2020.
Learning in real time
By 2023, Butrymovich had been promoted to manager and was looking to deepen her expertise. She discovered Gies Business’ fully online MBA – known as the iMBA® – through Coursera and was drawn to its structure, which allowed her to customize her curriculum and design her own schedule. Butrymovich strategically sequenced her coursework to focus on strategic leadership and management within the program’s digital marketing focus area.
That decision proved to be timely. Butrymovich began the program in January 2024, and by October of that year, she had taken on expanded management responsibilities, learning how to evaluate job candidates and manage others. She also immediately applied her coursework in project management to improve the department’s workflow.
“We have many long-term projects with people contributing across several different teams,” said Butrymovich. “Learning how to sort through that input, create structure, and establish clear timelines was helpful, and those skills could be easily integrated into my workflow."
Mastering the business side of the mountain
With her liberal arts background, Butrymovich found core business courses like accounting challenging but achievable. She says, in retrospect, that what she learned clarified the “why” behind management requests and gave her the confidence to speak more broadly about business with company leadership.
Butrymovich encourages those without strong accounting and finance backgrounds not to be intimidated by applying to the Gies iMBA program.
"It’s all about determining if it's the right fit for you and understanding that an MBA isn’t only for people looking to make a career pivot,” said Butrymovich. “If you already enjoy what you do and want to continue growing in your field, this degree is an affordable, manageable way to add to your professional skill set.”
Butrymovich believes the time spent juggling studying and a challenging workload was worth it because an MBA will continue to increase in value and position her for growth within her organization.
"The ski industry is where I want to build my career long-term,” said Butrymovich. “The Gies iMBA has set me up nicely for future opportunities because I love this work and the community I’ve built. I’ve developed a deep knowledge of how it operates, and I want to continue to support its success for years to come."