Child Abuse Survivor Wins Top MBA Service Award

His nonchalance was more than a little misleading. When he started the real hike, he was in it to win it. “In Georgia, you see a ton of hikers,” he said. “They start out, and they’re so happy! They’re like, ‘I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life.’ They know all about the trail and everything. But you’ll hear people say things like, ‘Yeah, you now, I’m not going to quit—unless, you know, if this happens or if that happens.’ You’re trying to hike 2,200 miles. What do you think will happen? You will be in pain.” McLaughlin would know: among other incidents, he sprained his ankle three times and kept walking on it.

“I felt like on a larger level, I was out there hiking for all those kids who were ever put down by their parents, beat down, or sexually abused—whatever,” McLaughlin said. “I just thought, what am I going to do? Just be like, ‘Alright, kids, I guess you can’t do anything with your life. I guess you’ve got a bad future ahead of you. I’m going home and you should quit, too.’ I can’t do that, so quitting was never an option. I would die before I would send that message to those people.”

“He really galvanized the entire student body—not just the Olin student body,” Fox said. To support McLaughlin, students did everything from volunteering to buying Hike4Kids t-shirts to showing up for fundraising events.

“I feel like those people are kind of like my surrogate family,” McLaughlin said of his peers at Olin. “When I have an accomplishment, I look to them to see if they are proud of me.”

The hike wasn’t without its dark stretches. “On those tough days, I would remember things that my mother said: ‘You’re a loser. You’re nobody. You suck at sports,’” McLaughlin said. “And I thought about those things, and I thought, ‘You know what? You were right about all those things, but you missed something else, and that is that I have a lot of heart.’ And I just kept going. And it was the same thing I had when I was a kid. I’m not going to let myself be broken.”

Getting to the top of the last mountain on the Appalachian Trail was the happiest moment McLaughlin can remember. He ascended 2,400 feet over just a few miles to reach the summit. “Physically, if I had seen a doctor, they would’ve probably been like, ‘Sir, you need to go to bed rest’ or something,” he said. “I felt physically terrible, but emotionally, my spirit was soaring.”

One would imagine that someone with McLaughlin’s past would seek out a quieter life. But McLaughlin, who will graduate in December, is already planning to complete a bike ride across the country. He’ll be stopping at business schools along the way.

“As a child—this may have been a foolish thing to think, but I always hoped that one day, somebody would kind of kick open the front door and take me away from my mother and her husband,” McLaughlin said. “But that never happened. I feel like I had to fight my way out.”

Today, he’s in a position to kick the metaphorical door open for others and put his extraordinary idealism to work. “That got me through it—through the hardest times,” McLaughlin said. “Just knowing that going forward was the only option and it only ever would be.”

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