Alumni Profiles - Social Impact MBA

“No matter the industry—technology, affordable housing, impact investing—I’m always looking for the people trying to get into the game but who are just on the periphery,” she says. “How can I help them get into the field and launch their impact journey?”

Learn more about Adwoa's work.

Watson enrolled in the Heller MBA program in 2004. “That program was very real for me,” she says. “I would take a fundraising class and then go home and write a fundraising appeal. I would take a human resources class and then go back and work on an employee handbook.” Nurtured by Watson’s real-time acquisition of MBA skills, her nonprofit (The Samfund) slowly grew and took on structure.

Learn more about Sam's work.

“The Heller School was an essential part of my career journey. It helped me understand how you could make the world a better place by focusing on the intersection of strategy, management and policy. What I enjoyed the most was getting a hard business education in an environment where the professors, case studies and students were all focused on social impact. There was a whole ecosystem for people like me.”

Learn more about Evan's work.

"I had never really picked up a calculator before going to the Heller School. I was a community organizer, an English and Sociology major in college, and as far as I knew, none of us knew what we were doing in terms of managing these organizations. That first summer at the Heller School was basically accounting boot camp.

"I love to understand systems. I love to understand how things work, and a bunch of the classwork that I did, operations management, some of the other classes, were really eye-opening for me and really gave me something that I had been looking for, which is a way to understand with some logic model: What are we doing? How are we doing it? How can we tell if it's being done?"

Learn more about Bill's work.