Hailing from Davenport, Iowa, Aubrey Kall initially chose to attend Northern Michigan University for color guard and media production, but ultimately didn’t continue to pursue those fields through her college career once she discovered student media.

When Kall was a freshman she worked at WNMU-TV and was involved in Public Eye News as a TV station staff member. 

“I had a wonderful amount of mentors … they encouraged me to get a minor in business because it is applicable to all things no matter your major,” said Kall. “I loved my business classes so much I ended up switching [my major to business] my sophomore year but I still stayed involved with the TV station throughout my whole career regardless.”

During her sophomore year, Kall founded Luminous Harmony, a company focused around the light shows that she put on. She programmed Christmas lights to sync up to the music, a skill that she used both professionally and personally. She would put on light shows for her housemates or rig the lights to flash orange and yellow to a snippet from Fall Out Boy’s “My Songs Know What You Did in The Dark” to prove to her RA that she could predict when the fire drills were going to happen. 

Through founding Luminous Harmony and later becoming the vice president of Light-O-Rama, the company that produces the equipment that Kall uses to put on her light shows, the business degree that she got at NMU is invaluable.

“In both my undergraduate and graduate degree, I really loved my management classes specifically,” said Kall. “It taught me a lot about how to work with other people, understanding different personalities, what motivates different people to be productive, how to structure teams that are going to work best together and plan goals.”

Planning certainly was important to Kall while she was in college, as not only did she have to balance the coursework for her major, her company and her work with Public Eye News, but she was also on the North Wind Board of Directors, the Special Events Committee and active in both her house and hall governments while living in Van Antwerp Hall. 

Managing to keep everything in line with her trusty sticky note app on her computer, Kall said it was what kept her in line during school.

“I had the days of the week at the top, Sunday through Saturday, and those were all in yellow, every single one of my classes or extracurricular or anything else had its own color. I would write the day that it was due on a sticky note, and I would drag the sticky note to the day that I was going to accomplish it. I would make sure that everything was done ahead of time. Nothing was going to creep up on me and I got to very satisfyingly delete the sticky note when I was done.”

That method seemed to have worked very well, given that Kall is now the vice president of a multi-million-dollar company, with a dream that she and her younger brother Adam might be able to make enough money to have a Kall Hall one day on campus.

“I had a lot of fun at NMU,” Kall said. “I really miss it.”