Meet NYU Stern’s MBA Class Of 2026

MARQUEE ATTRACTIONS

Among the Class of 2026, there were various aspects of the Stern MBA programming that drew them to Greenwich Village. Rena Ren, for one, plans to complete the school’s unique specialization in Luxury & Retail to prepare her to work in a high-end firm. In contrast, Scarlett Dockery is looking forward to joining the Michael Price Investment Fund, where she can work in the “high pressure” role of a portfolio manager.

“Deploying real capital and being answerable to investors means you need to have conviction supported by data and analytics when executing investments and it pushes you to learn how to adapt to risk in a tangible way.”

Whitney Ziesing plans to take advantage of Stern’s wealth of offerings in FinTech, while Youcef Bennour is eying the “Doing Business In” courses. In the latter, he says, students take a deep dive into a country’s business practices, exposing them to “global markets, regulatory environments, and industry-specific challenges.” Another popular option is the Endless Frontier Labs, an early-stage startup accelerator targeting science- and tech-driven ventures that represent “extraordinarily bold, new ideas.” Here, students gain precious experience by being paired with a founder to help commercialize and scale a venture.

“Working with a startup and participating in Endless Frontier Labs at Stern is especially exciting,” explains Walsh Kang. “I want to work with a company focused on a world-changing innovation and help founders engender the change that they visualize for the world. These founders are choosing to incubate their ideas at Stern and I’m excited to help.”

A CLASS PROFILE

Looking at the numbers, the Class of 2026 represents a record-breaking student body. Over the past year, applications surged from 3,075 to 4,550. By the same token, the program’s acceptance rate – 25% — hit a three-year low. Overall, the Class features 352 students, up 27 students from the previous year.

The 733 average GMAT also represents an all-time high among full-time MBA classes, where scores ranged from 650-780. Another 23% of the class took the GRE and posted a 328 average, another record. The same can be said for the 3.64 undergraduate GPA average.

As a whole, the class hails from 50 countries. 40% of the class are international students, down eight points from the previous year. That said, the percentage of women rose from 43% to 47%, with the percentage of underrepresented minorities increasing from 17% to 22%.

As undergraduates, 32% of the class majored in Business-related fields. Another 23% of the class holds degrees related to Engineering, Math, and Science. The remainder of the class is rounded out by students who hold degrees in Economics (18%), Social Sciences (15%), and the Humanities (12%). Professionally, the largest class segment last worked in Financial Services (22%). Consulting and Technology professionals represent 19% and 10% class shares respectively.

AN INTERVIEW WITH VICE DEAN NATE PETTIT

This year’s big news at Stern? Dean Raghu Sundaram stepped down last winter, replaced in the interim by former Vice Dean JP Eggers. What else is on the horizon at Stern? This summer, P&Q reached out to Nate Pettit, vice dean for MBA and graduate programs. From new developments to new courses and professors, here is what you can expect in the coming year at NYU Stern.

P&Q: What have been the two most important developments in your MBA program over the past year? What type of impact will they have on current and future MBAs?

Pettit: “It’s really challenging to pick two! We are continuously innovating to prepare our students to adapt and lead in a world of constant change. But I’ll share a couple of recent examples.

Led by my faculty colleague Suzy Welch, best known among Stern MBAs for her popular elective class, Becoming You, Stern launched the Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing earlier this summer. The premise: bring leading management scholars and top business leaders together to find actionable solutions in the discovery and pursuit of authentic purpose. Students will benefit from this new hub on campus designed to support them in discovering their most authentic selves and most fulfilling career paths. And, Suzy brings a truly indispensable wealth of experience, wisdom and enthusiasm to this effort!

Stern also initiated a new Climate Finance Initiative, directed by my colleague Johannes Stroebel, a P&Q 40 under 40 professor from 2022 and winner of the Fischer Black Prize For Financial Research with Impact. He is a star in more ways than one! This cross-school effort is supporting academic research, teaching activities and policy work in the climate finance space — a nascent, but especially relevant, sector of finance that he is helping shape. Students will get access to the latest thinking in this field.”

P&Q: Every January, P&Q publishes a “10 Business Schools to Watch” feature that highlights how schools are raising the bar and enhancing the student experience through innovation or expansion in programming or resources. What is one innovation that sets your school apart from your peer programs and makes you a business school to watch? Why is it so groundbreaking?

Pettit: “We deliberately integrate the laboratory for learning that is NYC into our MBA experience. Hands down, no other business school has the level of day-to-day access to the most exciting areas of NYC that we do. First and foremost, we have incredible access to our alumni because so many of them choose to work in New York after earning their MBA. That’s also what allows us to expose current students not only to the more traditional MBA career paths, but also to those outside of the norm, including media, retail, real estate, sustainable business, investment finance and more. For example, we built an Executive-in-Residence Program in which alumni business leaders across sectors offer on-campus sessions during a year term to give students an insider’s perspective on their industry and function. This effort has been popular among both the alumni and students.”

P&Q: What types of programs do you offer to sharpen your students’ soft skills? What areas do you emphasize and how do you instill these skills in your students?

Pettit: “Stern is now marking the 5th year of its Leadership Accelerator (full disclosure, I was the Founding Director, but it’s in even better hands now with the new Faculty Director, Dolly Chugh), and our approach to developing leadership skills is quite unique. To start, we custom built a “live case” to strengthen the leadership agility of our MBA students. The best way to think about it is to envision a “Broadway production” in terms of the scale, including 30 professional actors plus participating students and alumni. There is no pre-ordained script and no “right decision”; the only guarantee is that students will be immersed in the unexpected and confront change along the way. The environment feels real, unexpected, and at times, uncomfortable to simulate what it’s like to be a leader confronted by an unanticipated problem. After the experience, students receive personalized feedback and key takeaways from coaches.

Additionally, in classes, such as in our Leadership Fellows course (headed by Hannah Levinson, Director of the Leadership Accelerator), we use our own in-house cases that are enhanced with actor involvement, which is also quite unique. The goal is to offer structured practice that is very purposeful to challenge student conviction. In some classes, we also involve sketch artists to visualize their assumptions. Courses taught by many of my colleagues – Sonia Marciano (a P&Q best undergraduate professor), Jennifer Wynn (another P&Q 40 under 40 professor), Jonathan Haidt, Suzy Welch, Joe Magee, Michael North (yet another P&Q 40 under 40 professor!) and more — all complement our leadership approach.”

P&Q: What types of programming – through classroom instruction, extracurriculars, and treks – does your school offer to expose students to country-specific and global business practices? What have students told you were the most educational and fun aspects of these activities?

Pettit: “Stern’s “Doing Business In…” (DBi) courses are among some of the most popular and beloved by students, enabling them to explore how business is conducted in another country through one- to two-week intensives. They are offered during school breaks including in between semesters in May and also in January, when most other schools are headed right back to campus after winter break. These courses, which are taught in partnership with local MBA universities at the DBi destination, and led by local faculty, are held all over the world. It’s a learning and bonding experience, immersive in business and culture.

We also deliver a range of global travel courses led by Stern faculty. One of our newest ones is Real Estate Immersion led by Professor Sam Chandan, Director of Stern’s Chao-Hon Chen Institute for Global Real Estate Finance. The course frames real estate in the global context, and has already brought students to London, Abu Dhabi and São Paulo, among other locations. Students may also elect to take The Craft & Commerce of Cinema” which concludes with a trip to the Cannes Film Festival in France, and “Operations: Panama Canal,” which culminates with a trip to Panama.”

P&Q: What are the most exciting new courses that your school is offering to MBAs this school year? What makes them so unique and valuable?

Pettit: “What started as an incredibly successful pilot Stern Solutions experiential learning project will now be offered as a new elective in Fall 2024: Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) & Search Funds. Both the project and the course were designed and led by Adjunct Professor Andrew Breen, who has actively engaged in the ETA process. Over the past three decades, ETA has emerged as an entrepreneurial variant to the much-celebrated venture backed tech startup. While ETA has quietly existed for many years, the sector has accelerated recently, in part due to its financial outperformance. This stream of entrepreneurship is a prime growth sector for MBA students who want to pursue an entrepreneurial path that doesn’t involve inventing a new product or service or offering from the ground up.”

P&Q: Who are two new professors who’ve joined your faculty in the past year? What do they teach and how will they be difference-makers in your MBA program?

Pettit: “This fall, we are welcoming new faculty into several of our departments including accounting, economics, finance, management, technology and more. They bring a breadth of expertise in relevant areas including ESG, the impact of AI algorithms on society, the future of work, and more. We’re excited to welcome them into the Stern community.”

P&Q: What types of support does your career center and alumni provide to MBA students? How have these services and relationships made your graduates more competitive in the marketplace?

Pettit: “We know that students have put a lot of thought into their professional goals and may be particularly focused on the short term when starting their MBA. That said, on the very first day of their MBA experience, we encourage students to adopt a long-term view – what J.P. Eggers, our Interim Dean, calls playing the long game. Meaning, we of course want our students to be competitive coming out of the program, and Stern’s employment outcomes are consistently impressive. But the return-on-investment of a Stern MBA is about setting yourself up for success for life. We offer programming and career coaching not only throughout the MBA experience, but also lifelong for alumni. And efforts such as the Executive-in-Residence program I mentioned earlier serve as complements, giving students access to alumni who are role modeling the long game.”

Click on the links below to access in-depth profiles of students from the Class of 2026. 

MBA Student	Hometown	Undergraduate Alma Mater	Last Employer
Youcef Bennour	Federal Way, WA	University of Washington	Expedia Group
Justin Bose	Marietta, GA	Georgia Institute of Technology	United States Air Force
Tanmay Chhaparia	Kolkata, India	St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata	Chhaparia & Associates
Scarlett Dockery	London, United Kingdom	London School of Economics and Political Science	Hivemind Capital Partners
Walsh Kang	Shrewsbury, MA	Boston College	Deloitte Consulting LLP
Rena Ren	Sichuan, China	University of California, Irvine	Spark Universe Media
Taylor Rooks	Jersey City, NJ	Harvard University	Rockefeller Capital Management
Bella Roussanov	Plymouth, MN	Harvard University	Resolution Project
Whitney Ziesing	Marin County, CA	UC Berkeley	Apple