Here at P&Q, we get to know a lot of MBAs from many different backgrounds and countries. A year of reporting involves thousands of conversations with MBA candidates from across the world. And because of the nature and prestige of schools we cover, the conversations we have end up being with some of the world’s most talented and intelligent future business leaders. For many of those we speak with, business school is just one aspect of their lives. There’s usually much more to them than where they are going to school and what they plan to do after graduation.
This year, we had the privilege to feature musicians, artists, government leaders, activists, entrepreneurs, community leaders, and military veterans. Below, in no particular order, you will find some of our favorites. They come from different countries and schools. They’ve had different professional backgrounds and are they setting off on different career — and life — paths. We hope you enjoy as much as we did getting to know a bit about them.
Christopher Schildt and members his Oxford cohort visited Google on their Silicon Valley trek earlier this year. Courtesy photo
Christopher Schildt, From CIA To An MBA
At 38 years old, Christopher Schlidt is not your typical full-time MBA student. For one, he’s old compared to the majority of his classmates at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School. His work experience and age are both more than a decade above the class average. He also comes from an agency not many in MBA programs come from. For the 15 years between graduating with a bachelor’s degree in economics and international studies from Yale and enrolling in the one-year MBA program at Oxford, Schlidt held numerous roles for the CIA within the U.S. government.
Schlidt worked across departments at the CIA and held roles in leadership, communications, product management, and tech. “I loved it — it was a fantastic career,” Schlidt told us in May. “More of a career than most have, because I worked across the whole agency. But it was either ‘in for 20 more years’ or ‘leave now and go do something else.’ And being a technical operations officer, I kept seeing these amazing things the private sector was doing tech-wise and wanted to be a part of that.”
In an in-depth interview from last spring, Schlidt talks about his decision to pursue an MBA, why he chose to do one in Europe, and offers advice for similar candidates considering an MBA to transition careers.
Infinite Road co-founders Jaida Yang (left) and Preeti Sampat. Courtesy photo
Jaida Yang and Preeti Sampat, MIT Sloan’s Woman-Led VC Fund
It’s no secret the world of venture capital is grossly under-represented with women. About a quarter of major VC funds in the U.S. do not have a woman as a partner. Only about 9% — or about 170 — venture capitalists in the U.S. are women. Jaida Yang and Preeti Sampat — two recent graduates from the full-time MBA program at MIT’s Sloan School of Management — are aiming to make a dent in those stats. Together, they have launched and are continuing to grow their venture capital fund, Infinite Road.
“We both have been working with many startups over the past two years and have been tracking the startups process from the beginning to today,” Yang said last June. “We understand who those founders are, why they are working on the startup, how are they are working together, and what they are thinking about in terms of further expanding,” Yang says. “So we thought, why don’t we just create an institutional fund to help those companies grow further.”
Despite not having significant backgrounds in VC or raising funds, the two do have backgrounds working in finance and with startups. We chose them as two of our favorite MBAs for their trail-blazing attitudes and the impact their path and business could have on landing more women into the world of VC.
Alec Emmert, Wharton Class of 2020, atop Mount Kilimanjaro. Courtesy photo
Alec Emmert, From Arab Spring To Wharton
It’s not that Alec Emmert seeks out dangerous situations. But he does find himself in those scenarios more often than most. Emmert, who enrolled in Wharton’s full-time MBA program last fall, grew up with a father who had a career as a foreign service diplomat. At a young age, Emmert and his family fled Colombia, where his father was stationed, when a drug cartel put a bounty on their heads. After attending the Naval Academy, Emmert deployed four times to the Middle East as an officer on a nuclear submarine. In 2011, he was a watch officer in Bahrain when the Arab Spring erupted.
“Most officers consider business school immediately after leaving the military,” Emmert said in March. “I took a different path in that I chose to work in the private sector for several years before attending business school. About two years ago, I decided that I wanted to pursue an MBA, and have spent the time since trying to get into my first-choice school, Wharton. My acceptance is a dream come true.”
In a wide-ranging interview from last March, Emmert explains more about his unique path to B-school, getting accepted to Wharton, and how he plans to use the degree as a means to launch a socially conscious startup.
Pictured from left to right are Daniel McCartney, Baylis Beard, and Casey Brown. Courtesy photo
The USC Marshall Gender Parity Party
Many schools have talked about it. But it was the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business that first reached gender parity in its full-time MBA program. And the achievement largely stemmed from the grassroots efforts of a team of current students. When Daniel McCartney, Jessica Schleder, Casey Brown, and Baylis Beard stepped on USC’s campus, they noticed found that the class before them had just 32% women. After attending a Graduate Women in Business introductory meeting, the team decided they’d do what they could to not only increase the number of women in the full-time MBA program, but they’d shoot for 50%. After a year of working alongside the school’s administration to attract top female talent, Marshall’s incoming class this past spring was 52% women.
“We thought, if we want to reach 50% and hit gender parity at Marshall, we have to do it,” McCartney told us last fall. “We can’t rely on the school. We had to push it.”
The group created a blueprint for what other schools can do to reach gender parity, which included a lot of student outreach to applicants and prospective students. It also involved administration buy-in and efforts on the school’s end to also increase outreach and communication with applicants.
Anthony “Ace” Patterson renewed a rap career during his last semester in the full-time MBA program at Berkeley-Haas. Courtesy photo
Anthony “Ace” Patterson, Berkeley-Haas’s Rapping Consultant
For Anthony “Ace” Patterson, who recently graduated from the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, music and art has been a part of his life since before his family immigrated to the U.S. when he was a child. “Music is one of those things that has just always been around me,” Patterson told us last February. “My mom will tell you that classical music was the first type of music I listened to, but society will say reggae and hip hop became the immediate genres I gravitated towards.”
Despite taking multiple breaks from music and his poetry, life kept leading Patterson back to his craft. Then, during the winter break of Patterson’s second year of the full-time MBA program at Haas, he met with an old friend in Connecticut. Patterson’s friend asked him a question that hadn’t been on his radar for years. He asked Patterson if he still thought about music and knew how to rap. Patterson told him he still listened to beat occasionally online and every once in a while might freestyle to them. But the question was enough to reignite a passion.
As Patterson graduated and began crafting a new career in technology with a position at Facebook, he also began cobbling together a renewed rap influence, recording multiple tracks, but this time with a purpose.
“We all love Kanye West’s College Dropout, but how many people are rapping about their graduate degrees? How many people are encouraging you to save and invest as opposed to spending? And there’s nothing wrong with spending, but how many people are thinking about those types of things,” Patterson says. “I’m not condemning other rappers. I’d rather just be the change that I want to see and do it in a dope way.”
Rotman School of Management students organize the Accessibility, Inclusion & Universal Design MBA Conference & Case Competition. Courtesy photo
Students Bringing Accessibility To Rotman
It’s not unusual to hear discussions around inclusivity at the world’s top B-schools. This is a time of increased awareness placed on the importance of diversity and inclusion in the workplace and that trickles down into business education. But one piece of that discussion that is rarer is creating inclusive environments for those with disabilities. That changed this year with a conference and case competition dedicated to the creation of inclusive policies and awareness for students and future employees with disabilities.
The conference was the handiwork of four second-year MBA students at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management who, in 2016, founded and launched Access to Success, a student-run organization that serves to raise awareness about the importance of accessibility and universal design — the creation of products and environments that meet the needs of users with various types of abilities and disabilities. The main purpose of the innovative conference was to answer the question: Why bother?
“There is a larger need,” Varun Chandak, the president of Access to Success told us last January. “What about emotional support? The transition into professional support? It’s about industry mentorship as well as academic support where people can be themselves. That’s what’s driving the need for this.”
The conference featured multiple top MBA-hiring companies including Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and Slack.
Solan Strickling and St. Jules Desir, USC’s 30 To Melrose Podcast
Business can be creative. Take it from Solan Strickling and St. Jules Desir, two recent graduates of USC’s Marshall School of Business. The duo launched a podcast, called 30 to Melrose, that examines the television and film industries through the lens of business strategy. Though they now live on opposite coasts, Strickling in New York City and Desir in Los Angeles, the friends and colleagues make it sound easy, putting together the weekly podcast — whose episodes range from a half hour to more than an hour long — through the power of Skype. 30 To Melrose recently celebrated its 1,000th download on iTunes.
“In finance, one of my jobs was working as a generalist, where I would look at many different industries to understand how the market was moving,” Strickling tells Poets&Quants. “I spent a lot of time in the healthcare space, automotive, and other industries. I remember that whenever I did the entertainment or tech space, it never felt like work to me. I had a great job in finance, but I didn’t fully love it.
“That’s why I decided to go back and get my MBA; to get new skills and break into a new industry.”
Now, both with positions inside the world of entertainment, with Strickling at NBC and Desir at Paramount, the two are producing podcast episodes at a clip of two to three a month.
Nik Kumar spent nearly a decade as a part-time auxiliary police officer for the New York Police Department before enrolling in Columbia Business School’s full-time MBA program. Courtesy photo
Nik Kumar, Columbia’s Crime-Fighting MBA
The “volunteer” section of a LinkedIn profile might the be most over-looked and telling part so someone’s page. For Nik Kumar, it tells a story of an incredibly different life. For the full-time MBA student at Columbia’s Business School, the work experience of his social media page checks out. A stint at Bank of America Merrill Lynch right out of college. Then a couple stops at New York City-based private equity firms Sound Harbor Partners and AEA Investors. And then comes the volunteer experience where Kumar lists a decade’s worth of volunteering as an auxiliary police officer for the New York Police Department.
“I’ve never met a finance guy who also part-times as a cop,” Kumar, a Dallas native, said last spring.
Neither have his finance colleagues, who call Kumar the Banker Cop, for his Batman-esque persona.
“They all knew I did this on the side,” Kumar says, noting he often would rush from the office on Thursday and Friday nights to the 10th Precinct in Chelsea, where he served.
Kumar’s time as a volunteer cop has led him to policing the Thanksgiving Day parade, the New York Marathon, the Pope’s 2008 visit, and one of President Donald Trump’s recent visits. For four years, he worked the New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square. For now, Kumar has stopped volunteering to fully focus on his time at Columbia, but afterwards, he might pick back up the badge.
Kellogg MBA candidate Jane Henningsen and her fiancé, Michael Perry, a 2018 Kellogg MBA grad. Courtesy photo
The MBA Couples — Earning An MBA And A Marriage
The rigors of an elite MBA program can be tough. They can also be trying on a partnership, engagement, or marriage. But for Jane Henningsen and Michael Perry, who attended the full-time MBA program at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management at the same time, it was another opportunity to support one another.
“I think for me, there were some advantages in that I knew what to expect,” Henningsen told us in October. “I knew about what’s difficult about the first year — about how blindsided you are by things sometimes, how fast it all starts and how quickly recruiting starts, and what recruiting is like. In all of that, he was sort of the brave one who went ahead, and by the time I got to Kellogg I sort of knew like which weeks would be difficult weeks and things like that.”
While there is no hard data on it, a few MBA admissions counselors say it’s not unheard of for couples to seek MBAs at the same time.
“One of the first topics we discuss when we work with couples applying together is selection of target schools, respectively and together,” Alex Min, CEO of The MBA Exchange told us. “Would the couple consider possibly attending different schools if not both admitted to the same school? If not, perhaps there can be a geographical ‘consideration,’ such as both applying to HBS and MIT Sloan together, or both applying to Stanford GSB and UC Berkeley Haas together, or both applying to Columbia and NYU Stern together. That way, if they each get accepted to one of the schools, but not both to the same school, they can at least be located in the same general area.
“We also have to be upfront when assessing each person’s candidacy. It can be a somewhat challenging and sometimes sensitive conversation when the two are not similar in terms of candidacy and competitiveness — which also ties back to their target schools list.”
Perry and Henningsen make our list of favorite MBAs for being brave enough to do an MBA together and the willingness to go on the record about their experience.
Matt Cowsert. Courtesy photo
Matt Cowsert, NYU Stern’s Veteran MBA
According to Matt Cowsert, a recent graduate of NYU’s Stern School of Business, military veterans wanting to gain an MBA have a stereotype to overcome.
“The sentiment I often hear is, ‘Hey, you’re really good at following orders.’ Which is true, sure, but I also spent a lot of time with more autonomy than most 20-somethings are going to ever receive in the corporate world,” says Matt Cowsert.
Before enrolling in the full-time MBA program at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Cowsert was a budget analyst, managing $56 million. But, he says, that’s not the way he’s often been perceived.
“I feel like a lot of people think that I’ve been told what to do my whole life and I’m a drone, I can’t think for myself, there’s no creative thinking involved,” Cowsert says. “And it might not be true for everybody, but through anecdotal conversations I’ve had over the past two years, I’ve seen it more than I appreciate and I feel like it’s something I’ve tried to actively overcome throughout my interactions in interviews.”
As Cowsert transitions from school to a technical product manager position at Amazon in Seattle, he has put the lessons he learned through the whole B-school life cycle into a 101-page guide called What’s Next: A Military Veteran’s Guide to Maximizing Your MBA. In the book, Cowsert focuses on three essential transitions that military veterans go through while applying to business school: convincing yourself, convincing your target school, and convincing your target company.
DON’T MISS 2018 BUSINESS SCHOOL RANKINGS: THE COMPLETE COLLECTION and THE MBA STATS THAT MATTER: P&Q’S COMPLETE COLLECTION OF 2018 DATA
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