Lily Sugrue

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

“Hungry for the world: new books, places, ideas. Always building: relationships, systems, spaces.”

Hometown: Northern California’s Mendocino Coast (Fort Bragg, CA)

Fun fact about yourself: The summer before business school, I walked 500 miles solo across Spain on the Camino de Santiago.

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

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Voleon Capital Management; Program Manager, Strategic Projects

I worked at Voleon Capital Management, a Berkeley, CA-based quantitative hedge fund focused on machine learning strategies. I worked in various roles on the finance and operations team for the eight years between graduating from college and leaving for business school. In my last role, as the Program Manager of Strategic Projects, I worked directly with the CFO and Head of Strategy to build and run several new strategic initiatives and programs. I am drawn to both the intensity and the brilliance of the investing space and the problem-solving, “make things happen” mentality of being an operator.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? I interned at Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in the Philadelphia office.

Where will you be working after graduation? After graduation, I will be returning to BCG as a Consultant. I have spent my career working internally as an operator and am excited to deepen my strategic skill set in a client-facing role.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

* Wharton Women in Business, Co-President (2025-2026 academic year): This was a privilege. I’ve shared more details below.

* Wharton Communications Program, Fellow and Executive Board Member: Supported the MBA Communications Program, including working directly with program administrators on new community-building initiatives and curating supplemental communications programming.

* Student Life Fellow: Supported admitted students and first-year MBAs as they considered and later began their Wharton experience. Planned and hosted community-building events for the student body throughout the year (from apple picking to museum visits). This was a wonderful opportunity to connect with the first-year class and give back to the community.

* Wharton Wine Club Board Member (2025-2026 academic year): This year, I worked with the team responsible for bringing some phenomenal wine producers and distributors to campus. Wharton Wine Club is one of the best-run organizations on campus and one of the most vibrant communities at Wharton (we have over 500 members this year).

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? This year, I had the joy of serving as the Co-President of Wharton Women in Business. I am incredibly proud of the team we have built and what we’ve accomplished together. Our board of fabulous first- and second-year students has planned and hosted on average about an event a week over the school year so far and has truly made the club a more active presence on campus. This year, Women in Business hosted everything from full-club movie nights to intimate small group dinners to recruiting advice panels for our members. When I came to business school, I knew that building a strong community of other women in the business world was going to be one of my most important (and rewarding!) long-term investments I could make. I am deeply grateful to be part of creating that for myself and others during my time at Wharton.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? While at my last employer, I was given the incredible opportunity to run and re-develop the associate program I was hired into right out of college. I worked directly with everyone from senior leadership to our newest associate hires to add more structure and mentorship and revamp our training program, rotation process, and recruiting cycle. I was able to preserve (and build on) the culture that had drawn me to the program as an associate while also building additional frameworks and support to set it up for long-term success as the company grew and evolved. I became the development manager for every associate we hired. Each year, we continued to iterate on the program.

It was an extraordinarily formative and rewarding professional experience. We had full retention of associates while I was managing the program. When I left for business school, I had the joy of handing management of the program off to two of the associates from the first class I hired, who now get to put their own stamp on the program, exactly as it should be.

Why did you choose this business school? I came to business school knowing that I was interested in a COO / Strategic Partner path, a role that requires fluency across finance, operations, people strategy, and long-term organizational design. I didn’t want to specialize narrowly; I wanted to architect a toolkit. Wharton gave me the freedom and resources to customize my education to my interests, and I can’t overstate how valuable that has been.

Wharton is the “choose your own adventure” school. The depth and breadth of its resources and alumni network are truly staggering. Regardless of what industry or function you plan to pursue, Wharton has the curriculum, the clubs, and the people (professors, graduates, classmates) to help you get there. The vibrant extracurricular scene and the fluid timing of the core requirements provide the flexibility to take full advantage of charting your own path from the outset.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Nicolaj Siggelkow teaches Strategy and Competitive Advantage. He is the master of the cold call. He keeps the whole class on the edge of their seat, ready to make their case and defend their position. The mindset that he instills with his teaching style—the need to be ready for anything, to keep your composure and respond eloquently in the face of a challenge—is one of the most important business skills a leader can develop.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? Strategic Implementation with Claudine Gartenberg is fantastic. As someone who is deeply passionate about the operating side of the business world, I am biased, but I think every MBA should take a class that connects those big C-suite strategy decisions to the nitty-gritty of how they are executed in practice and encourages students to think deeply about where companies have thrived (or stumbled) as a result. Professor Gartenberg also brings in an extraordinary roster of guest lecturers. The chance to ask serious questions directly to senior executives is one of the great privileges of being a business school student, and this class created numerous opportunities to do so.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? In the last year, I’ve taken more and more classes in the entrepreneurship space. I enjoyed them so much that I added Entrepreneurship and Innovation as a second major this term (my first is Strategic Management). I’ve always been interested in how firms scale successfully and what sets successful strategy apart. I’ve found the exercise of thinking through business choices from the perspective of an entrepreneur to be one of the purest forms of business strategy. If I had known how much I would enjoy the space, I would have engaged with it even earlier in my Wharton career.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? HBS’s “Lego (A): The Crisis” is a case that has stayed with me and resurfaced across several classes. Because Lego is a product everyone grew up with, the discussion feels unusually tangible: we aren’t analyzing an abstract company, but a brand we’ve held in our hands. That familiarity makes the conversation especially engaging, while the company’s long history gives it strategic depth. It captures a central leadership dilemma: to grow, a company must evolve; yet if it strays too far from its core identity, it risks losing the very differentiation that made it successful. That tension between reinvention and preservation is one I expect to revisit throughout my career as I think about how to design strategy for sustainable, long-term growth.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? Philadelphia has an incredibly cool food scene, and not just because of its new Michelin stars. There are wonderful little BYO Italian places that have been around for decades mixed in with creative, upscale dining experiences like Her Place Supper Club. However, the true star is the soft serve ice cream. 1-900-ICE-CREAM does a different soft-serve twist every week, and it is absolutely one of the happiest places in the city.

What business leader do you admire most? Warren Buffett has always stood out to me (and many, many others) both for his fiscal discipline and for his deep commitment to philanthropy. I think it’s incredibly important to be deliberate with how you manage your resources, and if business school has reinforced anything, it is how critical this is to long-term survival in the business world. I also strongly believe in giving back.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? From Day 1, every Wharton MBA student is given a ChatGPT account through the school and encouraged to experiment with it. Each professor has their own AI policies as part of the syllabus, so depending on the class we may use it extensively or very little. For example, in my Innovation class, the professor shared slides full of his favorite AI tools, and we were encouraged to use them for everything from developing business pitches to creating product demos.

I find AI incredibly valuable for structuring and summarizing complex information and have been increasingly experimenting with it for task management. I also find it to be a great editing partner for refining written work (it’s rare to find someone willing to go through so many rounds of wordsmithing with you!). 

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? Carleigh Douglas is incredibly impressive. In a student body of almost 1,900 MBAs, she is one of those students whom everyone knows and admires. She has been focused on pursuing a career in philanthropy since before she set foot in Wharton, and she has very deliberately crafted her business school experience around that goal. She is always juggling half a dozen impressive commitments—from serving as a Nonprofit Board Fellow to serving as a TA for five classes to being elected president of multiple clubs—and she has still found time to build a plethora of deep friendships. I have always admired the breadth of relationships she has built across the Wharton community.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

* Serve as COO (or an equivalent strategic partner role) for a company in the finance or tech space while it is undergoing a substantial scaling phase. Shape the systems, strategy, and culture of the business to set it up for long-term success. I love to operate, and I love to build. I hope to have a career that allows me to do both.

* Spend a meaningful amount of time working internationally. I have loved my globally focused coursework and previous experiences working and studying abroad (and will be spending a post-graduation summer term at INSEAD to continue building on it). I strongly believe that one of the clearest marks of leadership is the ability to work effectively across many different contexts, a skill you are constantly building when engaging with international stakeholders and business problems.

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

“It is rare that a Wharton student treats their MBA experience like it’s a business they own. Many students embrace a customer mentally, where self is the priority. And no shade – the price tag and academic effort required make that a completely warranted mindset. In contrast, however, Lily is truly exceptional for her commitment to advancing Wharton instead of solely receiving or only immersing herself in the abundance. Her energy for driving – from WGA clubs to MLP workshops to Communications cohorts to peer preparation for class – the application of research best practice is extraordinary. Lily has come to me with ways that P3 facilitation workshops could incorporate faculty frameworks and lessons from other parts of the MBA curriculum, and she worked to realize those in multiple pilots. With her WWIB co-lead, she structured, empowered, and created accountability for an event per week for fellow students. She incorporated new ways of building community as a member of the Communications Program Board. As a Student Life Fellow, she runs events each quarter that now draw upon class material, in addition to hosting a bi-weekly dinner club for peers supporting one another on MBA goals.

If the Grad Division ultimately votes for Lily to be included within our formal nominees, there is plenty more to say about Lily’s academic and professional accomplishments. But her relentless drive to integrate Wharton curriculum into the student experience – not only for herself or classmates but for first years and future students – speaks to me of an individual who didn’t just come to Wharton, but as a Best and Brightest who is strengthening our book of business because she is fully invested in Wharton.”

Gwendolyn McDay
Senior Director, McNulty Leadership Program

 

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