About Will: Will is from Montclair, New Jersey, and began his career in data consulting before pivoting into the music and media industry, where he worked at iHeartRadio in New York City managing partnerships between music festivals and streaming platforms. At UCLA Anderson, Will is exploring the intersection of consulting and entertainment strategy, with a focus on media, technology, and creative industries.

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Creativity has always been central to who I am. Before business school, I spent four years at iHeartRadio managing partnerships between music festivals and TV broadcasters, and outside of work I produced music and played gigs around New York City with a wedding band I co-founded. Working at the intersection of art and strategy was exactly where I wanted to be, and I applied to Anderson specifically because I wanted to be in the center of the entertainment universe, at a program that prioritizes and fosters creativity among its students. So, when I tell people I’ll be spending my summer internship at a management consulting firm, it might seem like I abandoned that path.

But that’s not true. My first year at Anderson didn’t take me off course. It helped me figure out what the course actually was. When I arrived on campus, I had a rough plan: use the MBA to break into higher-level strategy work in entertainment. What I didn’t have was a clear sense of how to get there. After several years in entertainment, the industry still felt like an enigma – hard to map, hard to predict, and full of headwinds, especially in the age of AI. I knew I wanted to do more strategic work, but I wasn’t sure what that path looked like or where to start.

Anderson’s summer quarter helped me find my footing. All first-years enter together for a six-week orientation period: first-years are the only ones on campus, everyone takes the same accounting and leadership classes, and one of the key decisions early on is choosing an industry “immersion” to participate in. I had a consulting background before iHeartRadio, and I knew that consulting recruiting happens in the fall while entertainment recruiting takes place in the spring. So I chose the consulting immersion, figuring it would keep my options open.

What I didn’t expect was falling back in love with it. The immersion, and the Anderson MCA Case Competition that followed, reintroduced me to everything I had quietly missed about consulting: the pace of problem-solving, the satisfaction of breaking down strategic questions, and the discipline of structured thinking under pressure. I found myself energized in a way I hadn’t anticipated. The second-year consultants and alumni I met carried an air of sharpness and magnetism that pulled me back into the consulting orbit.

I also learned, critically, that consulting in Los Angeles naturally intersects with creative industries, as many firms here have deep roots in TMT (telecom, media, and technology). Conversations with Anderson alumni confirmed this: they described consulting projects involving media mergers, diligence for streaming platforms, and tech strategy for record labels. These conversations showed me that this path could take me exactly where I wanted to go, just through a different door than I had originally imagined.

So I dove into the Management Consulting Association, and what followed was one of the most rewarding experiences of my first year. The MCA’s structure is a masterclass in peer-to-peer learning. Second-years, fresh off their own consulting internships, were fully committed to training the first-year class: sessions on behavioral interviews and storytelling, dedicated case coaches available weekly, and first-years grouped into teams of four for over eight hours of structured case practice each week. The feedback was honest, the progress was tangible, and the dominant feeling, even in a competitive recruiting environment, was one of genuine support. Everyone wanted everyone else to get better, and we were all deeply invested in each other’s success.

That culture of “shared success” is something Anderson talks about often. In recruiting, I truly felt it. Through this process, I learned how to network with intention, tell my story clearly, and approach complex business problems with rigor and confidence. Case prep pushed me to build frameworks not just around profitability, but around entire business models – connecting growth strategy, operations, and long-term objectives. It fundamentally sharpened the way I think, in ways that I’ll carry forward no matter what I work on.

As I write this, the recruiting process has worked out, and I am heading into a summer where I will likely get to do what I came to Anderson to explore – working at the intersection of strategy and entertainment. But the outcome isn’t the point of this post. The bigger lesson for me has been about flexibility. Not passive, go-with-the-flow flexibility, but active, curious flexibility. Anderson gave me the structure to explore, the community to lean on, and enough low-risk runway to ask: what if I tried this? Sometimes, the path you didn’t plan for turns out to be the one that leads exactly where you hoped to go. For a musician who pivoted to consulting, then pivoted to entertainment, then pivoted to an MBA, maybe I should have been expecting one more turn in the road.

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Student Blogger: Will Kline ‘27

Undergrad: Duke University ’18

Pre-MBA: Content Partnerships at iHeartRadio

Leadership@Anderson: Director of Education, Management Consulting Association; Director of Marketing, Admissions Ambassador Corps; Sustainability Chair, Section C; Riordan Scholars Program Mentor