Meet University of South Florida Graduate Christine Turner

TAMPA, Fla. -- When Principal Executive Vice President Christine Turner enters a room, she commands it. Her strong demeanor emits professionalism, and as she begins to speak, heads immediately poke up over rows and clusters of cubicles.

Turner’s strength helped her establish connections with professors at the University of South Florida and in the community. Before she knew it, she was interviewing for a job at ChappellRoberts, an advertisement agency where she would spend the next 20 years.

“If it weren’t for the connections that my professors had in the community, if it weren’t for the reputation that University of South Florida had for creating students with a well-rounded background ready to make that leap from academic life to professional life, I wouldn’t be who I am today,” Turner said.

Turner started at ChappellRoberts in 1998, a year after she graduated from USF. She originally wanted to write for Rolling Stone, a dream that consisted of interviewing different people and doing something different daily. She found that same work diversity at ChappellRoberts.

“My job on a daily basis changes,” Turner said. “That’s the wonderful and exciting thing about working for an ad agency is that with the portfolio of clients, any given day you might be doing healthcare or financial services or working for our zoo client.”

In her day-to-day tasks, Turner uses many of the skills she picked up from the university, especially from her time spent working at The Oracle, a campus publication. She points to teamwork as one of the key elements of her education.

“Teamwork is a very important part of what we do here, whether it’s teaming internally or teaming with your clients as an extension of their team,” Turner said. “Those experiences where you break through the autonomy of college education and learn how to fill a role in a team, how to elevate a team, were really great things about the college.”

But Turner is neither the only powerful woman on the team, nor the sole USF graduate. Colleen Chappell, president and CEO of ChappellRoberts, and Deanne Roberts, the founder, graduated from USF.

“I think we’ve got the communications strategies that we learned in the university, and we’re able to transfer those into financial expertise, advertising, branding, marketing, public relations, social and digital,” Turner said.

The agency would not be able to operate without the skills she picked up at USF, according to Turner.

“The root of what we do is apply communication strategy to reach an audience, to change behavior, to increase sales,” Turner said. “We just run it through a layer of creativity, sales, or branding, whatever the task is.”

This strategy possessed by USF graduates has been vital to the development of the agency, and Turner has seen the company grow in the 20 years she has spent in the office. The small eight-person team that existed in 1998 has now flourished into a 37-person team, according to Turner.

All gifs created by Molly Urnek using giphy.com.