Chastity Lovely

The University of Texas at Austin, McCombs School of Business

“A proud MoMBA, linguaphile, and foodie, who can’t live without Pilates or the sea.”

Hometown: Dallas, TX

Fun fact about yourself: I am also a social masters student at UT and welcomed my son into the world during my first spring semester in the program.

Undergraduate School and Degree:

Bryn Mawr College, BA, English
University of Chicago, MA, Middle East Studies

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? The Holdsworth Center, Lead Learning Designer

Where did you intern during the summer of 2024? Bain & Company, Austin, TX

Where will you be working after graduation? Bain & Company, Austin, TX

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

Board Fellows, Co-President; Board Fellow at Austin Center for Grief and Loss
Graduate Women in Business, VP of Prospective Students
Peer Leadership Coach, Center for Leadership and Ethics
Forte Fellow
Holly Philp Miller Endowed Fellowship
Consortium Fellow

Social Work
St. David’s Foundation Earl Maxwell Scholar
Steve Hicks Endowed Scholarship

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Leading McCombs’ Board Fellows program as co-President has been one of the most rewarding experiences during my time at McCombs. A student run and led organization, Board Fellows places MBA students on local nonprofit boards to serve a 12-month term as non-voting members. At UT they say what starts here changes the world, and Board Fellows is opportunity for students to break out of the MBA bubble and have a positive impact on our wider community right now. Over this past year, we grew engagement and awareness of the Board Fellows program, increasing our student applications by more than 30%. We also worked closely with the program admin to secure a $1.25 million dollar grant from Golub Capital that will help Board Fellows continue to grow and develop into an even more robust and impactful organization.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? The achievement I’m most proud of is helping develop and launch a superintendent program for early-career superintendents in Texas at The Holdsworth Center in 2021. It was a bold leap outside my comfort zone, coming just as we were emerging from the chaos of COVID-19. I blended my experience in adult education with my classroom background, but what made it truly memorable was how much I learned from the Superintendents and fellow staff. Watching the program evolve through an iterative process and knowing it was making a real impact on school leadership was incredibly rewarding. It was a challenge—with a bit of chaos sprinkled in—but one that taught me the power of stepping into the unknown.

Why did you choose this business school? Outside of the supportive culture at McCombs, few business schools offer the opportunity to pursue a Social Work – MBA dual degree with a lot of elective variety. It’s been a fantastic opportunity to deep-dive into relational elements of change through a lens of human behavior and social lens. People are core to any successful enterprise. McCombs has enabled me to learn not just core foundation strategies and approaches to successful sustainable business, but integrate this unique perspective into doing business better.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Prof. John Doggett. We come into the MBA with this feeling we have to know everything and I appreciated how he encouraged students to one be human, in terms of emotion, passion, and reality that life can be hard sometimes. However, the two that we need be able to look critically at the basics – check our assumptions with data gathering and be passionate but open to correcting course when we need to. He is great at pushing students with good humor.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? Business Analytics and Decision Making with Prof. Kumar Muthuraman. It was really an eye-opening class for me on how we think about and weight quantitative analytics and the false paradigm of the “best” choice in a world of randomness. It’s made me rethink how I make and frame not just business choices but my own personal choices.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? Community Coffee every Wednesday morning, wasn’t just a reliable (and free) caffeine fix, but a great moment of really bring community together. Community coffee is this awesome moment where you were guaranteed to run into someone you know or meet new 1Ys while waiting in line for coffee.

What is the biggest myth about your school? McCombs is just for Texans – I’ve found that there is an incredible both US regional diversity but an amazing diversity of international students as well.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? There are so many reasons both personal and professional! If you are interested in the social or public sectors, Austin is overflowing with something like over 5,000 registered nonprofits, which makes it a great place to explore and flex the skills you’re learning to support local organizations and make a positive impact while you’re here. The city has been attracting more Fortune 500 companies to open offices here, so the opportunities are truly expansive. It is also such a chill place with an awesome al fresco food scene and vibrant outdoors and music culture. Outside of summer, you can’t beat the weather here! It’s a nice balance to the intensity that is B-school to be able to relax and enjoy great food and nature pretty easily.

What movie or television show best reflects the realities of business and what did you learn from it? Succession. The show really highlights not just the tension between ethics and profit, but the power of relationships. The Roy family exemplifies how empires are often built on fear, toxicity, and morally questionable decisions. It serves as a reminder of the dangerous rabbit hole of pursuing profits at all costs, and the profound impact this can have on relationships, company culture, and personal integrity. I think we can achieve a lot if we focus on developing our teams and cultivating positive relationships but sometimes it can get lost with the pressures businesses and managers face every day.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? AI is here to stay and McCombs has done a good job of acknowledging how it can be a helpful tool in both consolidating information, brainstorming, and kickstarting work, but also what the full cost of AI and cautions on using it. For example, when we were creating project key questions for a class, we were encouraged to use various AI tools to try and come up with the most ideas and bizarre combinations possible – or use to refine business questions more succinctly.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? Darrin Alba, also class of 2025, is one of the friendliest, caring, and optimistic people I’ve met at McCombs. He’s also a parent and somehow finds time to be an active McCombs Student Ambassador. Even if he is rushing from one thing to another he’s always checking in on others, making sure you’re doing okay, and there to help no matter what. It’s not easy to be a parent while completing your MBA and Darrin really has a way to brightening your day.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? I would love to work abroad for a short period and experience what professional life/family life feels like in other countries.

What made Chastity such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2025?

“Chastity is a visionary leader and a steadfast collaborator. She’s Co-President of Board Fellows, VP of Prospective Students for Graduate Women in Business, and a MoMBA (i.e. Mom+MBA). As only our second student to pursue our new dual degree MBA and Master of Science in Social Work, she is a pioneer who embodies resilience, intellect, and commitment to community impact.

Her creativity and strategic thinking truly distinguish her. “Chastity brings such innovative solutions to our case studies, always considering the ethical implications that others might overlook,” shares a classmate. “Her research is thorough, her recommendations are clear, and she has this rare ability to get everyone excited about tackling tough challenges.”

Chastity’s leadership creates space for others to grow. As a Peer Leadership Coach, she works with entering MBA students to build confidence, ensuring they graduate with both knowledge and self-assurance. Under her guidance, the Board Fellows program saw a 30% increase in student engagement, and she helped secure a $1.25 million grant to expand the future reach of the program.

Randi Shade, McCombs faculty who serves on our Board Fellows advisory board, perfectly captures Chastity’s influence on campus and beyond: “Chastity’s willingness to take the initiative has had impressive results on the future of McCombs Board Fellows. Her strong analytical skills and business acumen, coupled with her passion for meaningful change, have been inspiring to witness. She is an exceptional student earning both her MBA and MSSW degrees, and she will undoubtedly make a positive impact in her next chapters of life just as she has in her years as a graduate student at UT.”

What makes Chastity’s achievements even more remarkable is that she accomplished all of this while also prioritizing being a mom. Balancing the demands of dual graduate degrees and community leadership with motherhood exemplifies her extraordinary time management, determination, and ability to excel under pressure. Wherever she goes, Chastity shows up and makes a difference. She is the kind of leader who lifts others up as she climbs and is an exemplary McCombs student and future leader. We can’t wait to see what she her ripple effects beyond our community.”

Tina Mabley
Senior Assistant Dean, Full-Time MBA 

DON’T MISS: MBAS TO WATCH: CLASS OF 2025

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