Poets&Quants’ Favorite MBAs Of 2016

Taylor Force, Vanderbilt University Owen School of Management

On a school-organized trip last March, tragedy struck in the worst way imaginable. A group of 28 MBA students and four faculty members from the Vanderbilt Owen Graduate School of Management were in Tel Aviv, Israel learning about the regional startup community. On the second day of the trip, as groups of students walked from their hotels to find dinner, a terrorist ran through a crowd of other tourists at a crowded promenade on the shores of the Mediterranean, stabbing at random. First-year MBA student Taylor Force was stabbed and died on his way to the hospital.

The 28-year-old originally from Lubbock, Texas was a West Point graduate, U.S. Army veteran, and loved by his family, friends, and classmates. At West Point, Force joined the school’s alpine ski team and became an avid skier. Upon graduation, Force was stationed at Fort Hood, Texas, where he was a platoon lead. Force worked his way up to captain and was deployed multiple times to Iraq and Afghanistan, taking part in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Operation New Dawn in Iraq, and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan during his five years of service before entering the full-time MBA program at Vanderbilt Owen. Vanderbilt Owen Dean Eric Johnson described Force as a “quiet, authentic, and humble leader.”

“We focus on leadership without egos and that fit Taylor perfectly,” Johnson told Poets&Quants days after Force’s tragic death. “Our assistant dean of corporate partnerships (Read McNamara) quickly said it best. Taylor was the real deal and the son many of us would want to have. He is marked not by a loud self-promotion, but a lifetime of achievement.”

Shareef Abdur-Rahim, University of Southern California Marshall School of Business

Shareef Abdur-Rahim is the second highly successful professional athlete to earn an MBA from an elite business school this year. And similar to Lake Dawson, Abdur-Rahim is using his MBA to transition from a career playing the sport to a career in the business of the sport.

Born in Georgia, Abdur-Rahim is one of 12 siblings. From an early age, he had the frame and unique skill set to play basketball. Standing 6 feet, 9 inches, Abdur-Rahim had the stature of a forward, but he could play like a guard, which made him a coveted recruit when he chose to play at the University of California-Berkeley. Abdur-Rahim was the first PAC 10 conference freshman to earn Conference Player of the Year honors, an achievement he parlayed into a high draft pick — third overall — in the 1996 NBA draft. Abdur-Rahim went on to play for the Vancouver Grizzlies and the Atlanta Hawks, earning a selection to the 2002 NBA All Star team and the 2000 U.S. Olympic basketball team that won a gold medal in the Sydney Olympics.

Despite all of Abdur-Rahim’s on-court accolades, he is known just as much for being one of the NBA’s nicest off-court players. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, he started Rebound America, which raised more than $200,000 for families of the victims. Abdur-Rahim founded a similar fundraiser after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005. His own nonprofit, Future Foundation, has served more than 20,000 low-income youth and their families in Atlanta since 2001.

After a knee injury ended his career in 2008, Abdur-Rahim re-enrolled at UC-Berkeley, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology, notching a 3.8 GPA. Soon after, he enrolled in the full-time MBA program at USC Marshall, where he earned his degree this past spring. “I learned a lot about myself — just the idea that I can figure things out,” Abdur-Rahim said of his experience at Marshall. “I can go into a situation that is totally foreign to me and work and study hard enough, identify resources, and learn it. For me, especially, I spent a lot of my life in areas that weren’t academic. Being able to thrive here was really encouraging and gave me a confidence boost.”

Ching-Ching Chen and Preeya Sud, Harvard Business School

For Preeya Sud and Ching-Ching Chen, Sheryl Sandberg’s bestseller, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead is much more than a manifesto of women’s empowerment — it’s a way of life. So much so that Sud, who serves as editor in chief for the Harvard Business School student newspaper, The Harbus, and Chen wrote their own Lean In-inspired children’s book, Brave Becca Leans In.

Both Chen and Sud said they gravitated to Sandberg’s message immediately after its 2013 publication. “There was a buzz at work about the book and I read it and a lot of it just resonated with me,” Sud told Poets&Quants in April. “For me, confidence at work was something I had always struggled with.”

Sud and Chen met when they were both assigned to Section C during their first year at HBS. Both had worked through confidence struggles despite being accomplished young professionals and enrolling in one of the most coveted full-time MBA programs in the world. Spurred by an article in Glamour, which revealed the confidence gap between men and women starting as early as kindergarten, the two decided to write a book addressing the issue. In the 32-page paperback, Becca spends her first week of wizardry school focusing on the three core Sandberg principles of speaking up, acting with confidence, and attributing good results to hard work, not luck.

“Everyone wants their daughters to grow up as confident and as happy as they can be. My parents were very supportive of this because of that,” Chen said. “We don’t want girls in 20 years coming to HBS not wanting to speak up in class or undermining their opinions before they express them.”

Honorable Mention

Sanmay Ved, Babson College

For a few moments in September of 2015, Sanmay Ved, who graduated from Babson College with his MBA last May, outsmarted the world’s most powerful Internet giant. A former Google employee, Ved was poking around the site’s domain interface when he noticed something odd — he could buy Google’s domain name for $12. And he did. Within minutes of the transaction, Ved was contacted by Google and told they’d give him a “reward” of $6,006.13 to buy back their domain name. Ved obliged but asked that they donate the reward to the Art of Living India Foundation, a charity in his native India.

Anthony ‘Ace’ Patterson and Bomi Kim, University of California-Berkeley Haas School of Business

If this were a list of our favorite MBA rappers of 2016, Anthony “Ace” Peterson and Bomi Kim would be at the top. Last May, Peterson and Kim were so excited about graduating with their MBAs from Berkeley-Haas, they dropped a hilarious — and remarkably talented — rap video highlighting their favorite aspects of life as Haas students. Behind the song’s hook of “You Only Haas Once (YOHO),” the two artists bop around the east side of San Francisco’s Bay Area and even welcome a guest appearance from Haas Dean Rich Lyons, who cuts a little rug, so to speak.

Jennifer Ntiri, Duke University Fuqua School of Business

Before even enrolling at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business this past fall, Jennifer Ntiri had already accomplished much. As a first-generation American citizen, she grew up learning first-hand the value of cross-cultural relationships and experiences. After graduating from Harvard with a bachelor’s degree in psychology, Ntiri worked for a startup before returning to Harvard for a health program. That’s when she learned she had more than 30 types of food allergies. Ntiri decided to do something for herself and others like her, founding Underscores Baked Goods with her mother, Agnes. The company delivers gluten-free, vegan, allergy-conscious, non-GMO, and organic foods to local restaurants and grocers.

Women of Zell Founders Fund, University of Michigan Ross School of Business

During the summer of 2015, Sam Zell, a University of Michigan alum and chairman of Chicago-based Equity Group Investments, donated another $60 million to Michigan’s Ross School of Business for entrepreneurial efforts. Afterward, the school announced $10 million of that would be used for a highly elite investment fund — the Zell Founders Fund. This past fall, with the fund established and running, the school chose three MBA students to head up its first academic year. And they were all women. In a year where the country’s ultimate glass ceiling remained intact, having full-time MBAs Ashka Dave, Christine Priori, and Florence Noel lead a major B-school’s top investing fund is a sign of progress in the traditionally male-dominated investing industry.

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