Poets&Quants’ Favorite MBAs Of 2016

Julianne Perry, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business

In a year where social and political activists dot the list, none put their life on the line like Julianne Perry. This past spring, while her fellow first-years at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business were cramming for finals and finishing first-year capstone projects, Perry was in and around Yulin, China investigating dog slaughtering operations. Alongside two other investigators representing Direct Action Everywhere, a grassroots network of animal rights activists, their undercover video footage sparked national media coverage and helped lead to the rescuing of nearly 1,000 dogs by other activist groups.

On the night of May 4, while trying to extract footage from hidden cameras placed in a dog slaughtering facility, Perry, 29, was chased down and threatened by a group of men before eventually being arrested for trespassing. After being interrogated for about 20 hours by Chinese police, she and her fellow investigators were released on the condition that they leave the country immediately. Despite the police wiping the footage from their cameras and phones, the team was able to recover and extract footage with the help of some Silicon Valley tech experts.

“The number of victims and the level and intensity of the violence and oppression make this the most important issue to me,” Perry told Poets&Quants in June. “To anyone who says they’re just dogs, they don’t have feelings, I would say, just watch five minutes of the footage we have. I haven’t met one person who doesn’t break down and beg for us to turn it off.”

Marcelle Goncalves Meira, Harvard Business School

Marcelle Goncalves Meira and Pedro Meira entered Harvard Business School together in the fall of 2014, having beaten the odds to both be accepted into one of the most selective full-time MBA programs in the world. But tragedy struck, and when Marcelle stood in front of her cohort at Class Day last May to deliver the commencement speech, she was a widow.

After their first year at HBS, the Brazilian couple learned Pedro had developed an incurable stomach cancer. Four months later, in September 2015, he passed away at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

“I remember I was worried about taking final exams and anxious about whether I had chosen the best summer job for my envisioned career path,” Marcelle said in front of her fellow graduating classmates while delivering the commencement speech last spring. “Little did I know that the news I would receive that same week would drop a bomb in my life — a bomb much more devastating than I could ever have imagined.”

Marcelle’s courage and resilience in finishing her MBA while mourning the loss of her husband in a foreign country easily places her on our list of favorite MBAs for the class of 2016. “I truly would not be here today, about to receive my diploma with this class, if it were not for you,” she told her classmates. “Pedro gave us an example of kindness, courage, and resilience. But also of someone who was able to really engage in each experience and to deeply empathize with each person.”

Crystal Ruff, London Business School

When Crystal Ruff entered the full-time MBA program at LBS, she already came armed with a Ph.D. and a potential path to reinventing modern medicine. For the past decade, Ruff has worked alongside the world’s top researchers in the field of stem cell therapy and regenerative medicine. What was originally a field steeped in controversy, the use of non-embryonic stem cells has become a not-uncommon tactic to treat injuries for professional athletes. After a Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for the field’s groundbreaking potential in 2012, stem cell therapy has become the most exciting and promising field for treating neurotrauma and neuro-related disorders like cerebral palsy.

“Most of the time when you get a brain injury, stem cells die as a result,” Ruff told Poets&Quants in March. “If you cut your arm, it will heal. But the brain doesn’t naturally do that. Now, we can replace the cells that are missing to take the place of cells that have died.”

Ruff soon learned, however, that her goal to bring stem cell therapy to the masses was no longer a medical problem — it was a logistical problem. “How am I going to logistically get stem cells to everyone in the U.K. within eight hours before they expire?” Ruff wondered. “That’s not a science question, that’s a business question.” So after Ruff graduated with her MBA in 2016, she went back to work directing her own consulting company to advise private and public health institutions on regenerative medicine.

Lake Dawson, Indiana University Kelley School of Business

Lake Dawson is one of two professional athletes to emerge in MBA programs this year. Dawson, a former professional football player in the National Football League, is now using an MBA to advance his career as the senior player personnel associate for the Cleveland Browns. In college, Dawson was a wide receiver for a highly successful University of Notre Dame team; he then played for the Kansas City Chiefs alongside legendary quarterback Joe Montana before switching to off-field roles in the senior office for the Seattle Seahawks and the Tennessee Titans.

“From a financial standpoint, the NFL is a very strong business,” Dawson told Poets&Quants in February. “For me, I still think it is a people business that’s built on trust and getting the right people into position.”

In a My Story feature, Dawson reveals his path from being raised by two teenage parents in a small house where the dirt floor still showed in places to his rise to football prominence. At the age of 12, Dawson, his younger brother, and his mother rode a Greyhound bus from Florida to Seattle to move to where his father had set up a new life for the young family. While the move was tough at the time on Dawson, it inevitably sent him down a path of success; the alternative led to prison, the fate of one of his close friends. “It turned out to be a great decision for my family in terms of economic opportunities and education,” he recalled.