Julie Sandler, BA English ’06, credits her George Mason degree with helping her “break through the glass ceiling,” opening doors to opportunities that shaped her career.
Sandler started out as a young professional in the sports industry and realized her career would soon plateau without an undergraduate degree. She decided to enroll at George Mason while continuing her full-time job.
“George Mason provided access to an education I thought was out of reach. Now I build businesses and help organizations tell their stories.”
“Earning my bachelor’s degree opened the door to director-level opportunities that previously had been out of reach,” Sandler said. “[My degree] made my career dreams come to life and without it I imagine my professional aspirations would have been much harder and a bit more impossible.”
Over the past two decades, Sandler has built a career around marketing: she has co-founded and led agencies and served as chief marketing officer to a rapidly growing financial technology startup. She is currently founder and CEO of Small Great, a social impact venture studio that supports and scales mission-driven startups. Her work focuses on identifying promising founders and helping them build companies that generate both financial returns and meaningful social impact. Her career sits at the intersection of entrepreneurship, capital, and innovation.
Sandler says her English degree and the creative writing skills she honed at George Mason continue to shape her work every day, proving how critical thinking and storytelling are central to building and scaling successful ventures.
What skills from your degree do you use every day?
I use my creative writing skills every day, especially for writing brand positioning strategies and communicating with clients. The comprehension skills I learned while at George Mason are just as essential. Every day I’m reading briefs and research behind industries and businesses. Knowing how to comprehend and translate information into usable and workable strategies, either from a marketing or brand standpoint or from an investment strategy, is essential to my work.
In what ways do you leverage your education to make a real world impact?
Understanding how to connect with and relate to people came directly from my studies in English. Exploring characters and story arcs, learning about authors and the journeys behind their work, and developing my own writing all taught me how to build empathy and compassion for communities I may not personally know or have lived experience with. Those skills have been invaluable in making real-world impact, and I’m not sure I could have gained them in any other way.
What problem are you helping to solve today?
My biggest passion—and what has been my passion for the last decade—has been supporting mental health services and making mental health care more accessible. The communities I get to work with today are working in the space of psychedelic assisted therapy and the real-world integration strategies that help people address significant challenges that traditional treatments haven’t been able to resolve.
How does storytelling influence investment decisions?
Storytelling is essential to understanding a business, a market, a customer, a product idea, and revenue strategies. It isn’t just people and numbers and promises. Strong storytelling connects each of these areas and helps investors see whether a business’s promise aligns with their ability to deliver. When done well, storytelling effectively marries the promise with the reality of a business. Knowing how to tell that story, and tell it well, takes immense talent; it’s an understanding between those two dimensions.
Why do you choose to give back to George Mason?
George Mason shaped the life I’ve built and the career I’ve created. The access and financial support I received made it possible for me to attend college at a moment when that opportunity felt out of reach. I give back to George Mason because of how much it gave to me—and because I hope it opens the same door for someone like me, someone looking for a pathway into a life they never imagined was possible.