Ray Temnewo, who graduated from Emory College in Atlanta in 2018 earlier than working with McKinsey and Spotify, was accepted to Stanford Graduate College of Enterprise, Harvard Enterprise College, and the Wharton College on the College of Pennsylvania. He’s one in every of Poets&Quants‘ Favourite MBAs of 2022
2022 is closing quick. It has been a momentous yr for graduate enterprise schooling (sure, we all know we are saying that yearly, however that’s as a result of yearly it’s true!). It was a yr of conflict in Europe and weary pandemic restoration worldwide. Whilst enterprise faculties continued to grapple with the societal repercussions of the continued well being disaster, they felt the undulations of a graduate enterprise schooling market in a downturn — but 2022 noticed them reply to the ever-evolving calls for of {the marketplace} with one other collective step towards gender fairness and quite a lot of modern tutorial choices. 2023 guarantees to proceed these ongoing tales, and we are going to proceed to cowl them in depth and intimately.
However first let’s look again at one of the best tales of the nearly-finished yr: Poets&Quants‘ Favourite MBAs of 2022. Discover them beneath, starting with alternatives from our ongoing protection of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and the way MBAs in the US and Europe have responded. We even have tales of MBAs serving to refugees and the sick and deprived, striving for fairness, overcoming odds, innovating, disrupting, blazing trails, and usually working to make the world a greater place. And naturally, MBAs who have been such superstars that they gained admission to a number of elite B-schools, then shared the secrets and techniques of their success.
We’ve written these tales for greater than a decade. They’ve common attraction, so don’t simply take a look at one of the best tales of 2022. Click here for our favorite MBAs of 2021, here for 2020, and here for 2019.
Julia Nechaieva, in yellow jacket, a former Haas College of Enterprise MBA, protested alongside a number of hundred fellow Ukrainians out aspect the San Francisco Metropolis Corridor in response to the Russian Invasion. Photograph courtesy of Julia Nechaieva
Whereas a lot of North America and the West awakened February 24 to work emails or class assignments, lots of of 1000’s of Ukrainians residing overseas awoke to messages from household and mates of their residence nation who have been huddled in bomb shelters or basements, listening to air raid sirens, attempting to remain protected amid sudden conflict.
As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started, Poets&Quants reached out to dozens of present and former Ukrainian enterprise college college students, many now working world wide. We spoke and emailed with many, reporting their reactions, fears, and hopes, studying what it’s like to observe from afar throughout an unprecedented assault on their place of birth — and most significantly, what their mates, colleagues, and fellow MBAs may do to face with them.
Because the conflict weren’t on, our protection developed to incorporate tales of Ukrainian professors within the nation and world wide and the way the conflict impacted their curricula. Here’s a listing of the highest tales from 10 months of reporting on the affect of the conflict on the world of graduate enterprise schooling.
Stanford MBAs Collect Millions’ Worth Of Medical Supplies For Ukraine
Ukrainian B-School Prof: ‘The World Should Make Sure That Russia Fails’
Johns Hopkins MBA & Husband Organize Effort To Help Individual Ukrainians
What It’s Like To Run A B-School In A War Zone
Michigan Ross Prof Brings Lessons From Ukraine War Into The MBA Classroom
‘We Felt Like Superstars’: First Wave Of Ukrainian Students Join Ivey MBA Program
These MBAs Are Raising Funds To Bring Emergency Supplies To Ukraine
‘From A War Zone To An MBA’: Stanford Students Successfully Deliver Equipment To Ukraine
‘Russia Has No Chance Of Winning This War’: Zelenskyy Talks With Yale MBAs
From A War Zone To Oxford’s Hottest Degree Program: One Ukrainian Student’s Journey
Hawa Sultani along with her mom and Crest Cafe co-owner Monira Sultani
When Hawa Sultani turned down medical college, she took a yr off to do some critical soul looking.
Rising up as a first-generation Afghan immigrant in Queens, New York, Hawa’s dream had all the time been to assist folks like her. She had grown up with out medical insurance, and he or she wished to assist others get the care they wanted. However after some expertise within the healthcare trade, she realized that the inequities she wished to combat have been systemic.
“I discovered that there are lots of bigger components at play when it comes to why sure populations aren’t getting healthcare,” Hawa tells Poets&Quants.
Feminine-founded start-ups and female-led companies have gotten extra commonplace, although their numbers are nonetheless disproportionately low. In keeping with Statista, solely 20% of start-ups globally had not less than one feminine founder in the beginning of 2022.
However enterprise faculties world wide are enjoying their half to drive change, serving to a rising technology of feminine graduates from their MBA, Masters, and Exec Ed packages to pursue their entrepreneurial ambitions. This Worldwide Ladies’s Day, we spoke with a variety of feminine enterprise college graduates which have efficiently began a enterprise.
There’s a scarcity of range in enterprise capital, and a definite want for options. In keeping with current knowledge, in 2020 Black and Latinx founders acquired simply 2.6% of total funding, whereas women-founded groups acquired nearly 30% much less funding than they did the earlier yr. Progress, says Marlon Nichols, isn’t occurring quick sufficient — the place it’s occurring in any respect.
Nichols, a 2011 MBA from Cornell College SC Johnson Graduate College of Administration, says the issue isn’t that there aren’t sufficient folks from under-represented communities with nice concepts. It’s that they by no means get an viewers with the linked and deep-pocketed people who can assist them.
“Expertise is all over the place,” Nichols says. “However entry to capital isn’t.”
Impostor syndrome impacts even essentially the most proficient enterprise college candidates. Daniel Figueiredo suffered from it — however overcame it in spectacular vogue
When Daniel Figueiredo utilized to seven elite enterprise faculties throughout the US, he didn’t anticipate to get accepted in any respect of them.
He didn’t. He acquired accepted to 6.
Figueiredo was admitted to Harvard Business School, The Wharton School of the College of Pennsylvania, the College of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, MIT’s Sloan School of Management, New York College’s Stern School of Business — which supplied him a full-ride scholarship by way of the Consortium Fellowship program — and Cornell College’s SC Johnson College of Business. He was waitlisted at Columbia Business School.
Kayla Weismuller and Nicolle Lee are Class of ’22 MBAs at College of Pennsylvania’s Wharton College
Whereas girls make up practically 65% of residential realtors, girls on the entrance finish and funding aspect of the trade are a lot much less seen. In keeping with the City Land Institute, the oldest and largest community of actual property and land use specialists on the earth, women make up just 25% of its membership and only 14% of its CEOs. Additional, 93% of feminine CEOS lead small corporations with fewer than 100 workers.
Reaching gender parity in actual property investing, improvement, and personal fairness is not only in regards to the numbers, say Nicolle Lee and Kayla Weismuller, two Wharton College MBAs who will work in actual property investing and personal fairness after graduating this month. It’s about impacting choices on the very starting of the true property course of.
Hailey Carter
Hailey Carter knew there was big unmet demand for details about MBA careers in ed-tech. She simply had no thought how big.
The Northwestern Kellogg Class of 2022 MBA discovered when she launched a scholar initiative devoted to ed-tech, which is the mixing of rising expertise into schooling platforms, and exploring how MBAs can pursue a profession in it. About six months after the launch of EdTech MBA final fall, the platform has practically 500 members from over two dozen prime enterprise faculties in the US and Europe. It has hosted 20 CEOS for a sequence of digital “hearth chats,” staged panels, held networking occasions — and made, in Carter’s phrases, “lots of of connections” for these seeking to work within the area.
It’s positively the beginning of one thing huge, Carter tells Poets&Quants.
Sahar Jamal, left, at work in Nairobi
Sahar Jamal’s mission is to empower moms in order that they don’t have to decide on between a profession and their household.
Jamal’s Kenya-based firm, Maziwa, gives the primary ever custom-made breast pump in East Africa, designed to assist girls stability working and breastfeeding. Maziwa caters to girls in growing markets.
Since Poets&Quants spoke with Jamal last year, the 2019 Northwestern Kellogg MBA’s firm has made vital steps ahead: The corporate’s employed six part-time workers in Kenya and two technical contractors in Chicago, launched the Wema breast pump in August 2021, and expanded the product to South Africa in January 2022, with plans to develop throughout the continent.
Paige Finkelstein
Paige Finkelstein misplaced depend of the variety of occasions her life was put in peril.
A surgeon at a Miami hospital when the coronavirus pandemic broke out within the spring of 2020, Finkelstein was tasked with reducing open sick sufferers who may now not breathe — actually making incisions to launch trapped Covid air from their our bodies. “It was my job to stroll round on wards, and I’d carry a chest tube and a scalpel in my pocket as a result of so many sufferers have been placed on vents,” she remembers. “And while you’re on a vent, and your lungs are very sick, they lose their compliance, and you may develop one thing referred to as a pneumothorax (collapsed lung). So it was my job to actually run from mattress to mattress, to place chest tubes in these sufferers. And sorry, the unlucky scenario is that no person actually survived.
“It was actually morbid.”
Ray Temnewo was accepted to Stanford Graduate College of Enterprise, Harvard Enterprise College, and the Wharton College on the College of Pennsylvania
It was the second week of December and Ray Temnewo was starting to fret. The Emory undergraduate and McKinsey alum had utilized to the full-time MBA packages at Stanford Graduate College of Enterprise, Harvard Enterprise College, and the Wharton College on the College of Pennsylvania — three of the hardest enterprise faculties on the earth to get into — however he hadn’t but heard from any of them.
Tales of acceptances — and rejections — have been starting to trickle in to Reddit and different web sites the place B-school candidates share tales. Temnewo exchanged texts and calls with mates who had additionally utilized to grad college, and with relations who have been nearly as anxious for information as he was.
Then his telephone rang. It was a San Francisco quantity. Stanford on the road?
Nishul (left) and Nakul Juneja are 2022 graduates of the MBA program at Toronto Rotman
It’s no exaggeration to say that twin brothers Nishul and Nakul Juneja — current MBA grads of the College of Toronto Rotman College of Administration — do all the pieces collectively.
Not solely did each get their bachelor’s levels from Georgia Institute of Know-how, each labored for a similar firm — Hershey — following commencement. Each moved residence to India, then moved to Canada to get their MBA — the truth is each Juneja brothers even had the identical internship at Amazon of their closing yr at Rotman.
“There have been situations the place corporations have mentioned to us, ‘Your resumes are equivalent, you went to the identical highschool and faculty, and also you’ve had the identical internships. How will we differentiate the 2 of you?’” Nishul tells Poets&Quants.
Jude Watson, MBA ’23
Rising up in Seattle, Jude Watson discovered a ardour for neighborhood organizing by working with queer youth to seek out areas to fulfill, hang around, and entry social companies. Watson (they, them, theirs) helped begin the primary youth-led LGBT neighborhood heart of their hometown. Later, as a chef who largely discovered their commerce by working in Seattle kitchens, they co-founded Cooks for Black Lives Matter, a community-supported agriculture enterprise that has raised greater than $100,000 thus far.
Watson, now an MBA ‘23 at UC Berkeley’s Haas College of Enterprise, didn’t all the time image themselves in enterprise college. However their success with Cooks for BLM made them understand that they might declare entrepreneurship — and social entrepreneurship particularly — as a part of their id.
Talha Siddiqui
One of many few occasions that age was an element for Talha Siddiqui was when he was checking in for Welcome Week at his first actual job after undergrad. Siddiqui had joined Wells Fargo as a part of an early expertise program in mission administration however, at simply 19, wasn’t sufficiently old to verify into his lodge room.
“I needed to inform my supervisor to signal for me so I may keep,” he tells Poets&Quants.
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Siddiqui is the son of immigrant dad and mom, the primary in his household to go to school and the primary to work in a company setting. He’s additionally nearly definitely the youngest of his classmates to stroll on any of his graduation phases: He graduated highschool at 16, from UC-Berkeley at 19, and on June 4, on the ripe outdated age of twenty-two, he’ll graduate from the College of Chicago’s Sales space College of Enterprise along with his MBA.
Northwestern MD-MBA scholar Giuliana Zaccardelli
There are fewer than 500 fertility clinics in the US. Thousands and thousands of American girls both don’t have entry to fertility remedy or can’t afford it.
Giuliana Zaccardelli needs to vary that.
“By the point many ladies make their strategy to a fertility clinic, it may be months or years after they’ve began attempting,” says Zaccardelli, a 2022 graduate of Northwestern College’s MD-MBA program. “Even then, it’s not an easy course of.”
David Harris
When David Harris was 6 years outdated, his household requested him what he wished to be when he grew up. He replied, “A supervisor.”
“I bear in mind my uncle bursting into laughter,” Harris tells Poets&Quants. “My mom’s a instructor, and my household was anticipating a extra scholarly response. However my reply was merely that I wished to be a supervisor.”
It wasn’t easy precociousness: Seeing how his household had been affected by racial discrimination within the office, Harris says, he had internalized a lot of those experiences.
“I figured that if I used to be a supervisor, I may management what goes on at work and supply a protected area for my household,” he explains.
Jeff Phaneuf
Late final August, Jeff Phaneuf’s telephone began ringing. It didn’t cease for seven or eight days.
Because the budding entrepreneur ready for a transfer throughout the nation to attend Stanford Graduate College of Enterprise, his Marine mates from the Infantry Officer Corps have been attempting to handle an more and more determined crowd outdoors of Abbey Gate at Kabul Worldwide Airport because the date of the U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan approached. The group grew because the Taliban superior, begging the People to save lots of them, to allow them to into the Kabul airport and onto a airplane.
Phaneuf’s buddy referred to as to inform him that the scenario on the gate was a lot worse than what folks have been listening to again residence. A whole bunch of occasions a day, the Marines have been compelled to make life and demise choices on who acquired in and who didn’t, usually primarily based on misplaced or destroyed documentation because the inhabitants fled.
Jason Buchel
It wasn’t one MBA guide that informed him to not waste his time making use of to Stanford Graduate College of Enterprise in Spherical 3. It wasn’t even two.
In the entire preliminary calls he had with consultants to speak about his background, Jason Buchel heard totally different variations of the identical theme: “You don’t have a shot. Take into account ready till subsequent yr.” He figures he had 4 such calls in January 2020 after deciding a) he was prepared to use for an MBA and b) he wished to earn it at Stanford GSB, one of many hardest enterprise faculties on the planet to get into.
It’s not like he didn’t perceive the consultants’ factors: At 31, he was on the older aspect when it comes to work expertise. At 640, his GMAT rating was on the decrease aspect–practically 100 factors beneath the most recent class common of 738. Plus, he wished to use in Spherical 3, which has fewer class slots out there than Rounds 1 or 2.
Rakshit Reddy
Rakshit Nadiga Hanumantha Reddy is, by any measure, a wildly profitable entrepreneur.
Reddy is a founding group member of Waycool Meals, one in every of India’s largest agri-tech startups, which has acquired greater than $80 million in funding since 2015. The social affect firm works with 1000’s of Indian farmers to assist them promote produce at a good worth. Waycool has greater than 4,000 workers and boasts about $50 million in annual income, and has just lately expanded operations to Dubai.
So why would Reddy — who serves as chief development officer for a corporation that has performed nothing however develop — wish to return to high school to get an MBA? And why select a college, Babson School’s F.W. Olin Graduate College of Enterprise, that’s finest identified for its entrepreneurship packages?
Lawrence Osai
The stress was on Lawrence Osai.
In a family that boasted MBAs from Northwestern Kellogg College of Administration, the Wharton College on the College of Pennsylvania, and Duke Fuqua College of Enterprise, {the electrical} engineer-turned-consultant knew all eyes have been on him to make it four-for-four.
Problem accepted — and met. Osai set his sights on the highest tier of U.S. B-schools and gained admission to most of them, together with the Ross College of Enterprise on the College of Michigan, the Darden College of Enterprise on the College of Virginia, NYU’s Stern College of Enterprise, Columbia Enterprise College, Duke Fuqua, and Northwestern Kellogg. Most supplied him full-ride scholarships. An extended-time New York resident, Osai selected Columbia, becoming a member of the Class of 2024 this fall.
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