Spartan Profiles: Heidi Androl
APPRENTICE STAR
In its sixth season, NBC’s The Apprentice has moved from New York to Los Angeles. In this Darwinian reality show, business magnate Donald Trump “fires” contestants every week but ultimately hires the last person standing. Although she did not survive to the end, Heidi Androl, sales manager for an aerospace company in California, stood out as a multiple winner with an engaging personality and star power.
A native of Unionville, Androl now lives in Santa Monica, CA, but still considers herself a Spartan. “MSU was my first choice for college,” says Heidi, who attended MSU in 1998-99. “It’s a great school, it’s in the Big Ten, and it has a great advertising program. I also had some friends there already.”
In the summer of 1999, she spent her summer vacation in Southern California, living with a friend on a rented sailboat in Marina Del Rey. “I loved the weather, and so when August came, I was not sure I wanted to go back to Michigan,” she recalls. T
hen a number of work opportunities emerged in modeling and in acting. She became a model for Lee Jeans and also got some bit parts in soap operas like Days Of Our Lives. She also landed bit parts in movies such as the The Flintstones In Viva Rock Vegas (2000). “Having job opportunities was definitely an incentive to stay in California,” she says. That meant she had to follow the Spartans run to the NCAA basketball championship in 2000 via television.
Recently, because of her fame in The Apprentice, she has reconnected with some former friends from MSU. “I loved MSU,” she says. “I loved tailgating. I loved the campus. I used to go by the river and read. And I love Spartan men!”
However, Heidi has a longtime boyfriend—actor George Stults of television’s Seventh Heaven. “He was born in Michigan,” she notes. And she is working on a new book, In the Men's Room: A Girls Guide to Success in Business, which could be out this summer.
