HBS Students Recognized For Achievements

Nine Harvard Business School students have won the b-school’s Dean’s Award.

MBA Class of 2020 students Rachel Brown, Connor Cash, Robbie Dixon, Holly Fetter, Gaby Goldstein, Alexxis Isaac, Melanie Sperling, Ben Sullivan, and Billy Tabrizi were all named recipients of the HBS Dean’s Award.

“This year’s group of Dean’s Award winners—student leaders in several respects on campus —exemplify the School’s mission of making a difference in the world,” Dean Nitin Nohria says in a press release. “Their focus on making the School even more inclusive spurred important dialogue and learning across our campus. And, as we have responded to the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, they have unified their fellow students and the community in a really remarkable way. They worked so seamlessly together throughout the year, and I am personally grateful for their partnership and delighted to see each of them honored in this way.”

The Dean’s Award, according to HBS, “celebrate the extraordinary achievements of graduating students who during their years of study have also made a positive impact on Harvard, Harvard Business School, and/or broader communities through exceptional acts of leadership.”

WHAT RECIPIENTS HAVE TO SAY

The nine recipients will be formally recognized during HBS’s commencement week.

For Rachel Brown, chief events officer of the Student Association at HBS, one of her goals for the year was to ensure that existing events were inclusive.

“The magic of HBS for me is in the HBS community, so all the leadership roles I took on were focused on bringing people together and making the most of the HBS community experience,” Rachel says. “So much of what I’ll remember is the time spent engaging with classmates. I am so thankful that we took this year to focus on building up Spangler Night Live and other community events, because that increased sense of community from campus helped us pull together even more closely when we moved to a virtual world.”

Alexxis Isaac, the SA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion co-chair, helped to spearhead two activities on campus with fellow recipients: the Socioeconomic Inclusion Task Force and a Perspectives series, which brought students and faculty together to have community-wide conversations.

“This past year at HBS has been one of tremendous growth for me. I have begun to find my voice, and have discovered ways to use that voice to push for change,” Alexxis says. “With Perspectives, we wanted to catalyze more open discourse about invisible differences and create a space to do so. With the SITF, we wanted to highlight socioeconomic difference as an important lens of inclusion and lay the groundwork for institutionalized change. I am grateful for the support we have had from the community and friends in pushing forward these efforts, and I hope that we can serve as inspiration for others to use their voice and privilege to catalyze change.”

See what other recipients had to say here.

Sources: HBS, HBS