Caroline Petro

Yale School of Management

“In all that I do: Rooted in empathy, connected to community, cultivating excellence.”

Hometown: Norwood, Massachusetts

Fun fact about yourself: I absolutely love road trips and have driven to 47 U.S. states. Louisiana is the only continental state left on my to-visit list! Some of my favorite spots have been the breathtaking Ruby Mountains in Nevada, the unforgettable California coast (seen via Highway 1), the Badlands in South Dakota, the Appalachian Mountains in New Hampshire, and everywhere I’ve had great barbecue (including Memphis and Kansas City).

Undergraduate School and Degree: Dartmouth College, B.A. in History

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? I worked as a Partner Agency & Community Engagement Coordinator at Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services, a regional food bank that reached 275,000+ clients per month through a network of 130 partner agencies. My role was to strengthen the capacity both of the partner agencies and of the network itself.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Redstone Strategy Group; Associate Intern; Boulder, CO

Where will you be working after graduation? Undecided; Seeking a general management role where I can contribute substantively from my first day and bring my drive and curiosity to my work.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

President, Food, Agribusiness, & Beverage Club

Headed a leadership team of eight MBA students to host campus-wide events introducing students to food and beverage industry career paths, exploring innovative trends and companies in the space, and leveraging the community-building power of great food and drink to bring our classmates together

Fostered university-wide food systems community by hosting dinner and discussion event for ~80 students interested in food and agriculture across all Yale graduate schools

Cohosted the annual Big Connecticut Food Event (BCFE) with the nonprofit CT Food Launchpad, featuring over 30 food and beverage brands and over 300 guests in 2025; over 400 attendees projected for spring 2026 event.

Co-President, Golub Capital Social Impact Consulting Fellows

Headed a team of four student leads overseeing 16 client projects staffed by 52 student consultants.

Organized year-long curriculum to equip student consultants with the skills needed for their projects; collaborating with faculty and alumni to offer sessions on the fundamentals of social impact consulting, nonprofit accounting, fundraising, navigating the client relationship, and deliverable development.

Redesigned organizational structure, pairing each consulting team with a member of the leadership team and establishing monthly advising cadence.

Fellow, Golub Capital Nonprofit Board Fellows

Served two-year term as nonvoting member of the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center.

Designed and facilitated organization’s first strategic retreat in several years; retreat resulted in in-depth review of board committee structure and benchmarking analysis of peer organizations’ committees.

Ambassador & Interviewer, Admissions Office

Represented the university to applicants and recently-admitted students as a panelist, tour guide, and advisory resource in one-on-one setting.

Served as trained admissions interviewer.

Career Advisor, Career Development Office

Provided weekly coaching sessions to MBA students on professional goal development, accessing school career resources, strengthening their resumes, and positioning themselves as job seekers.

Designed and delivered workshops to dozens of students on recruiting for social impact consulting.

Launched Field Notes, a digital community for SOM students on unstructured recruiting journeys to connect with each other and exchange tips “from the field”.

Member, Meng Impact Investment Fund, Financial Inclusion Deal Team (Year 1)

Note: The Meng Impact Investment Fund is Yale SOM’s student-run investment fund, which invests in the seed and pre-seed rounds of for-profit ventures that we believe will deliver both financial and social returns.

In first year of MBA, served on the fund’s financial inclusion deal team and co-developed investment memo pitching the venture that was one of two selected for investment, in the amount of $50,000

Additional Roles

Dean’s Scholar; Sim Family Foundation Scholar; Forté Fellow; MBArk Fellow (one of two SOM students chosen by the former CMO of Whole Foods to participate in a program that brings students to major annual CPG trade show Natural Products Expo West)

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I am particularly proud of my contributions to the Big Connecticut Food Event (BCFE) through Yale’s Food, Agribusiness, and Beverage Club. The club partners with a nonprofit called the CT Food Launchpad to host an annual event. It is designed to strengthen the state’s food and beverage economy by connecting Connecticut brands at all stages of development with retailers, distributors, investors, and other key stakeholders in the CPG ecosystem. The BCFE includes panels, workshops, pitch competitions, one-on-one expert coaching sessions, tabling and sampling for brands, and ample networking opportunities. Over 300 guests attended and over 30 food and beverage brands were represented in 2025.

As a student leader on the event’s planning team both years of my MBA, I developed a program matching the brands that had been accepted to the pitch competition with industry experts who coached them on the development and delivery of their pitches. I also coordinated the in-person expert coaching program that occurs live on the day of the event. It allows any brand in attendance to talk through their business’s challenges with professionals in industries ranging from strategy and operations to legal services, graphic design, manufacturing, procurement, and more.

I am proud of my work connecting food and beverage entrepreneurs with resources that can accelerate their businesses’ development because it makes a tangible impact on the participants and their communities. Multiple brands have contacted our planning team to share that attending the event helped them make connections and discover opportunities that transformed their businesses and meaningfully increased their revenues. The BCFE is at the heart of everything I have loved about business school:

• It strengthens food and beverage companies that create products that delight their customers.
• It leverages the private sector as a tool to uplift the local economy.
• It gives MBA students an opportunity to contribute to the city and state that have hosted us during a transformative chapter of our lives.

As a former-nonprofit-professional-turned-business-student, I found the BCFE to be a tangible illustration of how the private sector can be uniquely positioned to drive positive change. Building the capacity of local businesses and connecting them to retailers who use the event to help source new products has a positive impact on the incomes and livelihoods of these business owners and everyone they employ.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? I am most proud of the project I spearheaded at Sacramento Food Bank & Family Services (SFBFS) to redesign their process for admitting and onboarding partner organizations to their network. SFBFS is a regional hub for Sacramento’s charitable food system, distributing millions of pounds of food annually to its partner agencies, who provide it to the public. During the pandemic, exploding demand for food assistance, coupled with emergency closures of nearly half the network, led SFBFS to pause expansion and focus on bolstering their remaining partners. Post-pandemic, the waitlist of hunger-relief organizations interested in joining their network had ballooned to over 100 applicants – a vast number for an organization with just over 120 partner agencies to begin with.

My project was to resolve this historic backlog and design a repeatable process that could support ongoing expansion efforts. I determined what gaps our network needed to fill, developed criteria to evaluate applicants, and constructed an onboarding system for accepted organizations. I developed 11 new partnerships over the course of this project, which reached over 100,000 individuals that year. It was humbling and deeply meaningful to have the opportunity to uplift organizations serving my community by connecting them with more resources. The experience also helped me develop leadership skills that have continued to serve me throughout business school, including honing an eye for evaluating wise investments, making tough decisions in the absence of obvious answers, and learning how to iterate on the design of systems and processes.

Why did you choose this business school? I chose Yale SOM because I found the student body to be warm, genuine, and intellectually curious. From the Zoom calls I had with students while applying – to my first moment on campus for my interview, to the jam-packed Round One Welcome Weekend – I loved how quickly my conversations with Yale students and admits dove to a deeper level. Without exception, the people who would become my colleagues, classmates, and friends displayed a relish for learning in even casual discussion.

For example, when introductory conversations turned toward which industry each person was leaving to come to business school, three different people followed up with me afterward to share articles they had read that were relevant to my work. I was captivated by how engaged students were in the classroom and out of it, both because it spoke to a high degree of intellectual curiosity and because it revealed a genuine personal interest in others. I saw these as important qualities for fostering a strong community and was delighted to confirm when I moved to New Haven that my perceptions were accurate.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? My favorite MBA professor was Thomas Steffen, an associate professor of accounting at SOM who teaches Managerial Controls. Professor Steffen has a true gift for making the theory come alive for students. The class I took with him focuses on how managers can use internal accounting information to delegate authority, monitor and measure performance, and incentivize their workforces appropriately. Professor Steffen is passionate about the subject he teaches, and his deep expertise does not prevent him from reaching students of all professional backgrounds. He has the ability to distill nuanced concepts into clear language and to connect with anyone and everyone, skills that make him an inspiring educator.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? It is difficult to choose one favorite course during my MBA, as I have had the privilege of taking many phenomenal courses at Yale. One that stood out to me was Professor Sarah Biggerstaff’s Leadership Lab. This class equips students with practical leadership skills, including coaching, delivering feedback, overcoming internal barriers to personal development, and navigating conflict with competence.

Powerfully, it also closes the gap between the “locus of acquisition”, or the point at which a student is first exposed to a new concept, and the “locus of application”, or the point at which the student puts it into practice. Most of the assignments required us to apply what we had learned that week to contexts in our own lives in which we were leaders and then to reflect on how that “practice” had gone. This blend of learning new concepts, immediately applying them to real-world situations, and reflecting on how we could improve, was an incredibly effective way for me to consolidate what I was learning.

I was paired with a fantastic peer mentor, who was another student in the class, and a professional executive coach. The latter both challenged me to unpack my underlying assumptions about how to telegraph competence and authority as a woman and to identify concretely what I consider excellent leadership in practice. The Leadership Lab stood out to me because I was able to put everything I was learning into practice immediately. As the co-president of the Social Impact Consulting Club leading multiple project teams of student consultants, for example, I was able to apply new-to-me best practices related to coaching and delivering feedback as I learned them.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? My favorite event at Yale SOM is the community’s annual celebration of Diwali. The South Asia Club hosts an evening of music, dance, delicious food, and student speeches about the traditions and beliefs that make this holiday meaningful to them. In addition to enjoying a lively and very fun night, I loved how much heart and soul my classmates poured into sharing this holiday with the rest of the student body.

It was fascinating and heartwarming to learn about what Diwali means to so many different people, and I was blown away by the talent and passion of the student performers. Attending Yale’s Diwali celebration reminds me of how generous of spirit our SOM community is. It would be easy for each student group to celebrate privately with others who share their cultural and religious heritage. Instead, my colleagues devoted countless hours of planning, coordination, and effort to create an event that welcomed the entire student body. Although I had never participated in a Diwali celebration before, I felt so at home among the twinkling lights and twirling dancers.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I am deeply grateful for all aspects of my MBA experience, including (perhaps especially) the parts that were challenging and the moments I realized I could have done something another way. Moreover, business school provided me often with the happy challenge of choosing between many good options: including the clubs to join and the classes to take.

In reflecting on my MBA experience, one such decision between good options stands out: which classes to take. Yale’s course catalog is an embarrassment of riches. While every class I took was valuable in a different way, I would have loved to take more classes at the university’s other graduate schools. I prioritized electives at the School of Management because I viewed them as important investments in the development of a new skill set – and they certainly have been. However, the extracurricular and social interactions I have had with graduate students from other Yale schools have truly enriched me and broadened my perspective. Immersing myself more fully in different intellectual environments could only have expanded this experience and might have planted seeds that could have led to fruitful insights in future work.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? In a class called Leading Small and Medium Enterprises, Professor A.J. Wasserstein assigned a case about a first-time CEO executing a turnaround at the Union Corrugating Company, My biggest takeaway from this case was that leaders do not receive instruction manuals – they must roll up their sleeves and figure out what to do as they go. This is a key difference from the life of a student and an empowering reminder that sometimes the best course of action is taking action in the first place. Professor Wasserstein also urged us not to hesitate to dive into the nitty-gritty details of any business or unit we lead; no matter that is germane to a company’s profit-and-loss is too small for its CEO to understand. Finally, this case illustrated to me that business leaders must develop a sense of when a decision is better made with quantitative methods and when it calls for qualitative ones. It is critical to have both sets of tools and know when to use them.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? I fell in love with the charming neighborhood where I chose to rent an apartment for my two years here. It is called East Rock and is a short walk from the School of Management. I live in a sunny unit on the second floor of an old Victorian house, and I have loved every moment of strolling along my tree-lined street, which gives way to a bustling thoroughfare with many shops and cafés. My weekend coffees with friends at local café Atticus, enjoying a cup of soft serve at the neighborhood ice cream shop Elena’s on Orange, and grocery runs at Nica’s Market will remain some of my fondest memories of my life in New Haven. The small business community in this city is remarkably vibrant, and East Rock’s many shops and cafes are part of what make New Haven feel truly unique.

What business leader do you admire most? I deeply admire José Andrés, a chef, restaurateur, and humanitarian whose commitment to making the world a better place powers all that he does. He immigrated to the United States from Spain at the age of 21, and over the next 35 years, he built a tremendously successful career in the culinary industry. He now owns the José Andrés Group, which operates dozens of restaurants, including multiple with Michelin stars. In 2010, he launched World Central Kitchen, a global nonprofit that provides food on the frontlines of humanitarian crises. I admire Mr. Andrés because he blended his passion for food with his prodigious business acumen to craft a personally fulfilling career and to use his gifts to serve the most vulnerable communities.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? One way Yale SOM has integrated AI into our programming is by offering electives that allow students to explore it in a focused way. Two classes that expanded the horizons of my AI usage were Strategic Market Measurement and the Empirical Strategy Lab. Both encouraged students to use AI’s ability to write code quickly to analyze large datasets. This allowed us to conduct complex statistical analysis much faster. I am currently taking a class that explores the science underpinning large language models so we can understand their vulnerabilities, what use cases they are best suited for, and what tasks continue to require human judgment and review. A key insight I gleaned from all three of these courses is that deep human expertise becomes more important than ever when potentially mistake-laden outputs are written so convincingly. Although AI may reshape the tasks that companies consider most important and may impact the roles that companies fill, it will not soon replace the judgment of human experts.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? I admire my classmate and friend Emma Fullem. Emma owned and operated a coffee shop for five years and worked at an economic development nonprofit before coming to Yale, and I feel lucky to have learned from her many outstanding qualities. When faced with a challenge, she rolls up her sleeves and dives in. She is unafraid to tackle the hardest parts of a thorny problem and unintimidated by a winding path. She asks excellent questions, listens deeply, and inspires and motivates others. Emma stays true to herself yet serves others selflessly. I strive to emulate her every day.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? I would love to serve as the leader of a charitable organization like the food bank where I worked before my MBA. One of the most powerful motivators that pushed me to apply to business school was the desire to sharpen my skills so I can use them in the service of others. Food access remains a cause of deep personal commitment for me, and I dream of one day returning to the front line of fighting hunger in our country.

I would also love to dive into the world of entrepreneurship and work for a food and/or beverage startup. In particular, I am an ice cream fanatic and envision launching my own ice cream brand someday.

What made Caroline such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“Having worked closely with Caroline, I’ve had a front-row seat to the way she shows up for the SOM community, and it’s been genuinely impressive. Whether she’s advising classmates, leading within clubs, contributing as a Non-Profit Board Fellow, or supporting prospective students through Admissions, Caroline brings a level of thoughtfulness and follow-through that reflects a real commitment to SOM’s mission of developing leaders in business and society.

What stands out even more is how intentional she is about her own journey. She doesn’t just go through the motions, she reflects, adapts, and then shares what she’s learning with others. Her career-focused blog on Slack is a great example of that. She’s been open about both the wins and the challenges of her job search, and in doing so, she’s created a space where others feel comfortable engaging, sharing ideas, and supporting one another.”

Mary Kate Scardillo
Career Coach
Yale School of Management Career Development Office

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