Colin Custer

Yale School of Management

“I’m an outdoors junkie who also gets a thrill from well-formatted Excel spreadsheets.”

Hometown: Richmond, Virginia

Fun Fact About Yourself: I have never set foot inside an IKEA

Undergraduate School and Major: University of Virginia, Class of 2013 – Political Science

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Head of Ugandan Operations – One Acre Fund

The Yale School of Management is regarded as a purpose-driven program. What is your mission? How will your MBA at Yale SOM help you fulfill that mission? We’re going to need to feed 11 billion people by the end of the century. Changing climates, increasing pest burdens, and difficult unit economics make this huge challenge even more difficult. Conventional agriculture is too resource-intensive to be the full answer. We need new solutions. A Yale MBA will position me to lead the charge—to harness the work of scientists, farmers, policy makers, and businesses to create a new, more sustainable future for food.

What word best describes the Yale SOM MBA students and alumni you’ve met so far and why? Invested. There’s a sense among students that we can’t “go it alone,” that we’ve all got a role to play, and that being at Yale represents a privilege that comes with responsibilities toward society. People here are driven to make the most of their time so that Yale continues to be at the forefront of meeting the world’s most pressing issues.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of Yale SOM’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? Two items were equally important:

• Yale’s legacy of educating nonprofit and social enterprise leaders, and wanting to contribute to that legacy.
• Connection to the Yale School of the Environment, and the world-class scientific education I can receive there alongside my MBA.

What course, club, or activity excites you the most at Yale SOM? The Center for Business and Environment at Yale (CBEY). Not only does it combine both elements of my career aspirations under one roof, it serves as a one-stop shop for professors, researchers, students, and business leaders who understand just how key private enterprise will be to achieving our sustainability goals.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: When I joined One Acre Fund’s Uganda program in 2019, it was on the brink of closure. Revenues were down over 50% from their peak two years ago, team morale was rock bottom, and we faced systemic corruption within our team. It took a lot of work and some incredibly difficult decisions, but within three months, we’d turned performance around enough to avoid closure. The following year, we not only exceeded our own internal targets, but had some of the best results of any of One Acre Fund’s seven country programs. By the time I left to attend Yale, we’d trained and promoted several Ugandan staff to senior leadership positions previously only held by foreign-educated staff, recorded the lowest fraud ever in Uganda’s program history and, most important, helped a record number of Ugandan farmers grow more food for their families.

How did COVID-19 change your perspective on your career and your life in general? COVID has thrown into stark relief how privileged I am. I had a job that let me work remotely and gave me access to resources to ride out the height of the pandemic in relative comfort. Many of my Ugandan friends and colleagues saw their savings wiped out, jobs disappear, and access to food, medicine, and farming inputs dry up. It has driven home how critical it is to build resilient societies and strengthen people’s abilities to weather these shocks.

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point and what do you hope to do after graduation? As I became more senior in my career, I realized that I had skills to manage the small teams, but struggled to manage an entire department or division. I want to learn to lead an organization, not just a team, and how to best harness a broad and diverse group to meet the challenge of sustainably feeding a generation.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? Stanford

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into Yale SOM’s MBA program? By now, I’m sure you’ve heard “just be yourself” a million times. I’d urge you to also take some time—a lot more time than you’d think—to know yourself. Step away from the applications and do some self-reflection, journaling, or discussing with your friends. What drives you? What values or beliefs have shaped your actions up to this point, and what do you want to shape your actions in the future? If you’ve done a good job, this self-reflection will make writing your essays, and telling your story, much more streamlined and powerful, and make it so much easier to “just be yourself.”