IBI alumna finds her niche in corporate relationship-building

When COVID-19 hit, Rosette Luko ’12 reevaluated her life, as many of us did. She already had climbed the corporate ladder at PepsiCo, worked overseas as a French auditor and as a product manager for quality assurance for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

“Every five years, I asked myself, ‘Am I changing? Am I moving? Am I stagnating?’” she said.

She now works as a product marketing manager at Vallen Distribution Inc. in Belmont, North Carolina.

“Vallen is a leading provider of indirect industrial supplies, which are all the materials that manufacturing plants need to function,” she said. “I just came from BMW yesterday. BMW makes cars. To make cars, people need gloves. BMW makes cars, but they don’t make gloves. We work with vendors. Our company facilitates that from a service perspective.”

Messiah prepared her

She came to Messiah as an international student from the Democratic Republic of Congo whose family had recently moved to Pennsylvania. An international business major with a minor in French, she was one of the first students to participate in the International Business Institute program.

That gave me a sense of what the international market was like,” she said. “You have that perspective of how business works in the U.S., but you get a different perspective in Europe. IBI gives you that different worldview.

Called to business

Luko credits her Messiah professors with investing in the international students on campus, and the care her teachers showed informs the work she does now. They didn’t just tell her she mattered, they showed her. As a result, she lives out that relationship-building work ethnic in her interactions with vendors.

“Think of how many manufacturing plants we have across the U.S. I can’t go to every single one,” she explained. “It’s my job to connect with vendors. I work with the salespeople who work with the end users. That’s how you make relationships.”

She says her Messiah experience also helped her navigate the corporate world from a Christian perspective. “I’m not a missionary, but I’m called to the business world. I take my faith with me, and people see something different in me. I have that faith-based mindset to ask, ‘This is business, but, ethically, is this right?’”

–Anna Seip