Faham Zakariaei
Don’t Settle For Less
June 13, 2006 | by brett | Permalink
Born and raised in San Jose, Faham attended Leland High School before enrolling at the University of Arizona to study Management Information Systems (MIS).
He accepted a position, while in school, that pertained to his major and soon found that that he hated MIS! At that point, he thought that his decisions to pay out of state tuition and study MIS were the worst decisions he had ever made in his life. It wasn’t a matter of his capabilities, he just found himself unispired. So Faham switched his major to Business Marketing and Management and got involved with an organization that focused on sports marketing. This group was the Sports Marketing Association (SMA) at the University of Arizona . SMA gave him the opportunity to begin learning about the business and professional side of sports.
Given the difficulty of breaking into this highly sought after industry, Faham decided that experience was going to be his most important asset in making himself marketable to HR departments of professional sports teams. Faham decided to use his SMA and Alpha Kappa Psi memberships to the fullest in order to gain the necessary experience. Most notably, Faham was able to bring Jerry Colangelo and Peter Magowan to speak to the student body at the University of Arizona. These were the two biggest events that he was able to accomplish as a student.
In the realm of work experience, Faham volunteered to sell tickets at the Colorado Rockies spring training. This was an opportunity which Zakariaei made for himself when he called the team’s front office asking what he could do to help the team while they were in town. This further would prove important later, as it extended his resume and added to his marketability.
The semester before he was to graduate, Zakariaei decided to cold call the Director of Sales of the San Francisco Giants. He asked if he could learn a little more about the organization. This lead to an informational interview.
Although the ball club had no openings available at that time, Faham kept in steady contact with the sales director. So much that when an internship eventually did open up, Giants Enterprises, offered it to him. This internship would later lead Zakariaei to a full-time position as a special event sales executive. This position focused on selling seats to games with an anticipated low attendance. Faham was now in the sports industry! As his knowledge of the industry grew, so did his good reputation within the organization. Faham is now the Sales Manager of special events for the San Francisco Giants Baseball Club.
Here are some of the questions that we asked Faham, and his answers:
What kind of advice would you give to students that would like to work for the San Francisco Giants?
“Get started early. Best thing I ever did was called every organization that I thought would be interesting to work for and set-up meetings to get a good idea of who I could potentially be working for. You really have to spend the time to set up face to face meetings because then you’ll see what they want to see out of you as a candidate, and whether you want to work for them.”
If you could tell college students anything, what kind of advice would you give them?
“Make sure you don’t settle for less. If you settle for less and you’re working somewhere you don’t want to then you won’t be passionate about it and eventually I believe you won’t be successful. Don’t be frightened or hesitant of going after something.”
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