CC Obi-Gwacham

MIT, Sloan School of Management

“I’m a creative yet analytical person who loves business, the arts, and the exchange of ideas, and I enjoy bridging these passions to solve challenging and pressing problems in innovative ways.”

Hometown:

• Born in Queens, NY
• Raised in Lagos, Nigeria; Queens, NY; and Fayetteville, NC
• Have lived in Brooklyn, NY for the past 7 years

Fun Fact About Yourself: I do the New York Times mini crossword every day, and my personal record is completion in 7 seconds.

Undergraduate School and Major: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; majored in Business Administration and minored in Hispanic Studies.

Most Recent Employer and Job Title:

• Employer: COTA Healthcare
• Title: Director, Operations/Delivery & Product Innovation

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of MIT Sloan’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? Sloan is top ranked (or close) in many of the specialties that most interest me. These include product, information systems, management, and entrepreneurship. At COTA, I worked on projects that were centered around technology, data, and digital products; I wanted to attend a school that had similar foundations given technology’s ever-expanding role in business and society.

MIT Sloan prioritizes building, designing, innovating, and getting your hands dirty (MIT’s motto is “mens et manus”, Latin for “mind and hand”). I wanted to get a top-notch business education while graduating with the utmost confidence in my ability to start my own venture one day.

What course, club or activity excites you the most at MIT Sloan? I’m excited to join the entrepreneurship ecosystem at MIT Sloan, which offers so many opportunities both academic and non-academic through the Entrepreneurship and Innovation coursework certificate and the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, along with access to founders, innovators, and exciting industries.

Action Learning Labs are one of MIT Sloan’s biggest attractions. Which lab interests you most? How does it fit with your interests? I’m most interested in Innovation Teams (iTeams), a course in which interdisciplinary student teams take MIT research breakthroughs and work to bring these technologies from the lab to society. One of my key interests involves commercializing innovations, and iTeams teaches a structured approach to doing exactly this, covering everything from technical exploration to market understanding, value economics, and generating impact.

When you think of MIT, what are the first things that come to mind? How have your experiences with the Sloan program thus far reinforced or upended these early impressions? The first things that come to mind when I think of MIT are innovation and technology. My experiences with MIT Sloan so far have shown me just how deep and extensive the program’s commitment and resources are as it pertains to innovation, entrepreneurship, research, development, and technology. The level of access is unprecedented – they range from founders and engineers within the MIT ecosystem, to innovative courses across both MIT and Harvard, and to the greater technology industry within Boston.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: I designed and implemented production systems and operational processes that enabled our start-up to scale and to achieve/maintain revenue hypergrowth for several years. Additionally, through these processes, we curated and delivered a patient dataset that was used in the FDA approval of a revolutionary new drug that offers survival for multiple myeloma patients who otherwise would have no treatment options.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? Harvard Business School and Stanford Graduate School of Business

What do you hope to do after graduation (at this point)? I hope to land a job in product strategy, marketing, or business development at a fast-moving, brand-name company with a good culture in an interesting problem space and/or be a founding member of a new venture.

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into MIT Sloan’s MBA program? Study hard for the GMAT/GRE, start your application early, and do a lot of research to find out if/why MIT Sloan is the right program for you.