Meet Cornell Johnson’s MBA Class Of 2027

COLLEGE TOWN CAMPUS MEETS BIG CITY CENTER

Johnson’s dual campus setup is another differentiator for MBA students. Along with studying at the Ithaca campus, MBAs can take courses at Johnson Cornell Tech in New York City. Located on Roosevelt Island, the campus is the equivalent to an R&D Center. Working in a studio environment, MBAs join teams of engineering, design, and law students to turn ideas into prototypes and products, while practicing entrepreneurial basics like pitching investors. Plus, students are given space to partner with areas startups and tech companies. As part of the program, MBAs can spend their second-year at Johnson Cornell Tech, pairing their mastery of first-year business fundamentals with developing and managing the product design process. For students looking to remain in Ithaca, there is the option to take select courses on the NYC campus too.

“You get everything you do in an Ivy League business school, plus the benefit of being co-located with world’s leading computer science and engineering groups,” explains Manoj Thomas, Associate Dean of New York City Initiatives, in a 2025 interview with P&Q.

Johnson Cornell Tech also ranks as the #4 MBA entrepreneurship program by P&Q in 2025. It features a near 2:1 student-to-mentor ratio, with the school providing an average of $11,526 in funding per student startup according to P&Q. In recent years, the program has expanded its reach into health, robotics, cryptocurrency, cybersecurity, and human-centric design programming. Along with its wealth of resources, Johnson Cornell Tech remains anchored in New York City, the world’s 2nd-largest startup ecosystem. Known for its strengths in AI, ClimateTech, and life sciences, the city attracted $15-billion in investment from 2022-2024, while spinning out over 150 active unicorns. Still, it is the spirit of the program, as much as its location and resources, that makes the learning experience so unique.

“It’s an ecosystem built for action,” says ’20 alum David Stein. “It’s not just academic; it’s a true incubator woven directly into the curriculum. You’re surrounded by engineers, designers, law students, and other business students who are all intensely focused on building real products, not just talking about theoretical case studies…There’s a tangible energy of ‘let’s build this now’ that permeates the entire campus.”

TAPPING INTO THE LARGER CORNELL ECOSYSTEM

Among first-years, Gio Caballero can’t wait to dig into the Startup Studio at Johnson Cornell Tech. “It’s raw, hands-on product building. No gatekeepers or corporate red tape. Just a team and the challenge of turning a real idea into something that works. I’m drawn to that kind of pressure-cooker environment because that’s where I grow fastest.”

And Johnson’s New York City location isn’t the only place where the Class of 2027 can access a wider universe beyond the traditional business school. Humberto Ponce de León is already weighing taking courses at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and the Industrial and Labor Relations School. This flexibility also appeals to Yaron Klein, who plans to someday start a VC firm focused on addressing climate and energy challenges.

“I was drawn to Johnson’s unique integration with other colleges across campus. Programs like the Green Technology Innovation Fellowship reflect something deeper, access to interdisciplinary collaboration. The ability to work with engineers, scientists, and policy experts gives me the perspective I need to become not just an investor, but a thoughtful partner to the founders I hope to support.”

AN INTERVIEW WITH DEAN VISHAL GAUR

What are some other advantages for MBA candidates to consider with the Johnson MBA? Last year, P&Q reached out to Vishal Gaur, Dean of the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management and Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. Here are his thoughts on what to expect from the program, along with how it supports international students and alumni.

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?

Gaur: “Experiential learning and stronger consulting and tech immersions. Last year, our faculty decided to create a focus on experiential learning in the second year of the MBA program, complementing our first-year immersions. This means students can choose experiential learning from several alternatives – entrepreneurship, sustainability or operations, corporate consulting projects, joining the Cayuga Fund, becoming an emerging markets fellow, and spending a year at Cornell Tech in their tech Studio curriculum. This approach enables our students to explore the vast opportunities that Cornell provides and challenge themselves with experiential opportunities before they graduate, and it is one important development that I am very proud of.

We also conducted the second iteration of our newly-launched consulting immersion to prepare students for careers in the consulting industry and broadened the scope of our digital tech immersion to include not only product management but also tech operations and other tech career paths. These developments are a result of continuous innovations that we introduce in our MBA program by collecting feedback from recruiters, students, and faculty. The goal is to stay current, relevant, and competitive.”

P&Q: What do you see as the main differentiator that distinguishes your MBA program from other schools? How does it enhance the student experience and make them more attractive to employers?

Gaur: “Our MBA program excels at preparing students for career success, which is consistently reflected in our high rankings for placement and graduate salaries, and is expressed in our message “from ambition to impact.” This is made possible by several features of our MBA program – the immersive curriculum; our close-knit community with a culture of supporting one another (especially second-year students and alumni investing in first-year students); our distinguished faculty who are dedicated to student success; and, more recently, our collaboration with Cornell Tech through the dual-campus model. The outcome is that students are better prepared and have a high rate of turning internships into full-time offers.”

P&Q: What types of services do you provide to first-year MBAs to ease their transition into business school?

Gaur: “The first semester for an incoming student is indeed the toughest and the most pivotal. At Cornell, the first course that our students take is Leading Teams. This emphasis on team-based learning enables our students to connect more quickly with each other and form a strong, tight-knit cohort that supports their transition into business school. Second- year students support the first years through career work groups; alumni regularly visit the campus in the first few months to conduct coffee chats; and our career management office starts conducting workshops on each career path from day one. There is no shortage of services and resources for students at Cornell, and they can benefit from a well-laid-out path that puts them in the center.”

P&Q: What types of support do you provide to international students before and during business school to enable them to better acclimate to your country?

Gaur: “Cornell is a diverse, international university founded with the motto of any person, any study. We have approximately 40% international students from over 35 countries in our MBA class. To enable international students to acclimate and thrive, we support many robust culture-based student clubs as well as mentorship by prominent international alumni. The biggest cultural event of Johnson School in the Fall semester is the Johnson Diwali, where the community comes together to celebrate with dance and music. Academically, what I am proud of is our Emerging Markets Institute Fellowship, which admits more than 120 MBA and EMBA students each year, enabling them to contribute meaningfully, acquire global business knowledge, and become leaders.”

P&Q: How does your program integrate other disciplines, such as the liberal arts and STEM, across your curriculum to provide students with a more interdisciplinary experience in business school?

Gaur: “Business education should indeed be interdisciplinary to prepare students to work in diverse industries with people from different backgrounds. As a part of the SC Johnson College of Business at Cornell, our MBA students are allowed to take any graduate elective course across the college and have it count towards their degree, whether in hospitality and real estate at the Nolan School of Hotel Administration or in environmental economics at the Dyson School. Many students also take advantage of our central location on the campus and take graduate courses in the rest of Cornell, including the Law School, the Industrial and Labor Relations School, and engineering. Some students go a step further to pursue dual degrees, such as JD-MBA, MILR-MBA, MPA-MBA, etc.”

P&Q: What are two ways that your program is incorporating Artificial Intelligence into your programming? How do they better prepare students for the future world of work?

Gaur: “AI must be a part of every business discipline today. Two years ago, we instituted AI curriculum innovation awards for our faculty to introduce new AI-related topics into core and elective courses in all areas, and have made nine awards thus far, resulting in new curriculum in every area from strategy to finance, marketing, etc. This year, we have instituted a new GenAI grading policy in our courses, taking a closer look at our pedagogy in the world of GenAI. Ultimately, our goal is to prepare students to be not only proficient in the use of AI tools but also experts in making business decisions for AI contexts.

P&Q: What types of educational and career support do you provide to alumni after graduation? How does it make them more valuable to employers during their careers?

Gaur: “Education and career support are growing needs from alumni as they seek to acquire new skills and look for new opportunities, so we have been growing our resources in this area. We have a dedicated career office for alumni that provides graduates with career support, access to resources, and networking with other alumni and executive search firms. For education, we provide our alumni access to online eCornell certificates that have been developed by our faculty. Each year, we create lifelong learning workshops on a new theme — this year’s theme is the business of AI, and last year’s theme was sustainability.”

Click on the links below to access in-depth profiles of the Class of 2027.

MBA Student	Hometown	Undergraduate Alma Mater	Last Employer
Camila Alves Guilarducci	Santos Dumont, Brazil	Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto	Siemens
Gio Caballero	Whittier, CA	UC Santa Barbara	MarketCast
Charlie Doebbler	Denver, CO	Baylor University	Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
Karen Fang	Toronto, Canada	Toronto Metropolitan University	Turner & Townsend
Gillian Grossen	Fort Lauderdale, FL	Northwestern University	Accenture
Yaron Klein	Petach Tikva, Israel	Ben-Gurion University of the Negev	IronVest
Ryan Lopez	New York City, NY	New York University	TY Danjuma Foundation
Gregorio Montefameglio	Bologna, Italy	University of Bologna	DICE.FM
Leah Nakaima	Jinja, Uganda	Arizona State University	Keurig Dr Pepper
Vaishali Nayak	Mumbai, India	University of Notre Dame	Huron Consulting Group
Humberto Ponce de León	Puebla, Pue, Mexico	ITESM	GAPSA
Sherry Zheng	Melbourne, Australia	University of Notre Dame	Supernova Technology

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