Our Own Brand of Magic: Judy Ramsay Maillet '97
This article was originally published in the Winter 2021 edition of the Chatham Recorder Alumni Magazine. To view the full magazine, click here.
Judy Ramsay Maillet ’97, operations director for Disney Institute, remembers the first paper she ever submitted to her history professor, Dr. Christina Michelmore. “I think it was the hardest I’d worked on anything, and I’m pretty sure I got a C on it,” she says. “Basically, Dr. Michelmore circled big sections, and wrote ‘Tell me why this matters’ and ‘So what?’ and ‘Fluff’. And that’s the most significant writing communications lesson I’ve learned in literally my entire life.”
“Now I have interns every year, from undergrad or graduate school, and the first time they turn something in, they rarely answer ‘So what?’,” she continues. “I have told the story of my first paper to so many interns—that you’ve got to answer ‘So what?’ or else it’s just a bunch of fluffy nice words that mean nothing.”
Maillet grew up in Apollo, PA, with Chatham connections firmly in place. Her mother worked at Chatham, and Maillet attended Chatham’s Music and Arts Day Camp, which was, she says, “a pretty phenomenal experience.” Maillet says that when it came time to start looking at colleges, Chatham wasn’t on her list, but her mother insisted that she go for an overnight campus visit. “I was adamant that I wasn’t going to go to Chatham, and by the time my mother picked me up the next day, it was the only place I wanted to go,” she says.
“We stayed in one of the old mansions—it might have been Fickes—and the students just welcomed me in. I felt that everyone was accepted, and everyone seemed to know each other. It was this amazing academic experience, and at the time it was a women’s college, but you could go right down the street and have the typical college experience if you wanted it,” she says.
Maillet majored in history and minored in visual arts, practicing drawing, printmaking, and sculpture. She and her first-year roommate, Jessica Jones Szalla ’97, started a club called Students of Community Service (SOCS), that focused on giving back to the community. “I had a really great group of friends, and we were all active in a variety of organizations and wanted to help make the world a better place,” she says. She also did “a little bit with sports,” served as an admissions ambassador for all four years, and worked as a Resident Assistant in Dilworth Hall. “That taught me a lot about responsibility and caring for others, and that students had different needs. It was a whole new experience to have that level of responsibility. I loved it,” she says.
“I studied history because my mom and a couple of other influential adults told me to study what I had a passion for,” says Maillet. “My two favorite professors were Dr. Michelmore and Dr. Linda Rosenzweig, and being a part of their classes made me such a good writer and researcher. Post-Chatham I went on to get my MBA in marketing and management. You take my graduate degree, plus the history background with research and writing, alongside the visual arts exposure, and it makes total sense that twenty years down the line, I would be working in marketing and brand management! At the time I was just studying what I was interested in, but looking back my education makes so much sense.”
Following graduation from Chatham, Maillet moved to Florida, where she worked a few jobs at Disney and learned about a graduate school called Rollins College. “It was a private liberal arts college, and their approach to the classroom was very similar to Chatham’s,” she says. She enrolled and went full-time for two years. A series of roles followed, spanning industries, but always coming back to marketing and branding.
And then, about ten years ago, “I wasn’t looking for a job, but I had a really good friend who said ‘There’s this place called Disney Institute.’,” Maillet says. “I’d been really interested in the trifecta of brand/leadership/culture and how when those three things are strong, companies thrive. I had the brand and the leadership experience, but I didn’t have a lot of that culture piece. So I thought, ‘You know what, this is interesting; let me apply for this role’. And that’s the first professional role I got at Disney Institute.”
Disney Institute is the professional development and business advisory division of Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, and their customers are “individuals or entire organizations looking to enhance their abilities to build a healthy culture in their company,” explains Maillet. “Most people know Disney from theme parks, vacations, and movies. We take those experiences and show that there are business insights that you can easily adapt and apply to whatever it is you do.”
As operations director for Disney Institute, Maillet oversees all the guest experience for both online and in-person delivery for the consumer-direct part of the business—"individual courses that people can buy,” she explains. “That means overseeing all the systems and technologies that go along with that. From purchase of the product all the way through the delivery of the product, and all the tech that goes along with it.”
“It can feel to an outside individual that working at Disney Institute is not as magical as working in a theme park every day, but I will tell you, we work really hard and we make our own brand of magic in the professional sense. And that’s one of the reasons why I continue to work at Disney. I love the idea of leaders coming through, learning from our content, and going back and making a meaningful difference for the people who work for them.”
“And another piece of the puzzle that I’m so, so excited about is that I oversee what is called our Summit product, which is basically Disney Institute’s convention product,” says Maillet. “Most recently, we were planning a veteran’s institute summit, which was professional learning and education focused around businesses learning how to attract, hire, support, and retain veterans and military spouses.”
Maillet has also overseen annual customer experience summits, and “two years ago, I got to put on the first-ever external summit focused on Women’s Leadership,” she says.
“Disney was kind enough to support a lot of existing women leaders, and emerging leaders to become part of this project, which I loved. I have real passion around women’s leadership and supporting emerging professionals as much as those of us who are more seasoned, so I hope we bring the women’s leadership summit back.”
Maillet is a member of ChathamConnect, an online platform that connects the Chatham community through mentoring and purposeful conversations. “Connections are important,” says Maillet. “They are the things that bond us. Mentoring emerging leaders is something that’s important to me and something I try to do at Disney, but I also think back to some of the people who helped me at Chatham. I had some really good mentors, whether it was the employee I worked for four years in the admissions office, or the people in Career Services, or professors who connected me to internships. It makes sense that if I’m going to have a connection to college students, it should be at Chatham.”