MBAs To Watch: Class Of 2026

On the surface, bankers and conservationists have little in common. Bankers are stylish alphas, busy cutting deals out of ritzy high-rises. Conservationists tromp through the reeds and mud, stewards of wildlife and natural resources alike. Two different lifestyles. Two different mindsets. Two different ends.

As an MBA student, Gavin Livingston crossed this gap. Before joining Southern Methodist University’s Cox School, Livingston worked as the mammal curator for the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance. Here, he would orchestrate the transfer of Black Rhinos from San Diego to Honolulu and Elephants from Africa to America. That doesn’t include returning the Scimitar-Horned Oryx – picture 300-pound Antelopes with 3-foot horns – back to their natural home in Chad. Along the way, Livingston managed the Alliance’s budget, coordinated international logistics for transporting wildlife, authored strategic plans to maximize organizational impact, and formulated agreements with international governments and partners.

In other words, Livingston was shouldering banker responsibilities long before he started at JPMorgan Private Bank after earning his MBA.

A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE

Receiving a full-tuition merit scholarship, Livingston earned his keep at the Cox School. He was elected president of Pride@Cox, while serving as both a career coach and admissions ambassador. He even partnered with a Buenos Aires Ronald McDonald House as part of a Global Leadership Program. Over his two years at Cox, Livingston’s growth impressed school leaders like Kerry Wright, who headed up operations for the Spears Institute for Entrepreneurial Leadership.

“His decision to pursue an MBA represents an unconventional pivot from building conservation partnerships in the wild to building strategic partnerships in the boardroom…His pre-MBA career and MBA training together have given him the rare ability to bridge worlds, bringing new ideas and bold thinking to spaces that benefit from disruption. I’ve never encountered an MBA student with the perspective Gavin Livingston brings.”

Livingston himself came away from business school “energized” by entrepreneurship, which draws on his passion for pursuing growth and opportunity for others. At the same time, he hopes to mentor the “next generation of bankers” working in wealth management.

“My journey in finance was shaped by mentors who generously shared their experience and offered honest guidance, helping me grow and pursue opportunities I might have missed,” Livingston tells Poets&Quants. “One of my greatest ambitions is to pay that forward and become a mentor who empowers aspiring professionals, especially those who are pivoting into finance as I did. I believe that true leadership is not only about achieving results, but also about caring for and investing in the people around you.”

PRODUCING PODCASTS & SUPPORTING ARTISTS

Gavin Livingston personifies the 2026 MBAs To Watch as a whole. Comprised of 117 spring graduates, these MBAs didn’t always follow clear and linear career paths. However, their unconventional experiences and deep intangibles made them indispensable – if not unforgettable. Filled with conviction as much as insight, the MBAs To Watch elevated every conversation they joined. Always pushing, learning, and creating, these MBAs were the catalysts who made things happen, even if they handled the details behind the scenes. Fierce advocates, they always showed up for their classmates, never letting on just how much was on their plates. In the end, every classmate could share a story about them, knowing that someday they’ll be doing something big.

To compile the MBAs To Watch list, P&Q reached out to 83 Full-Time MBA programs. Ultimately, P&Q received 217 nominations, which were divided between May’s Best & Brightest MBAs and the MBAs To Watch. The 2026 batch hails from 70 business schools, including the University of Chicago’s Booth School, INSEAD, London Business School, MIT Sloan, and the Wharton School. This year, men outnumber women by a 60-to-57 margin. American students also outpaced their foreign counterparts: 66-to-51. In terms of employers, the Boston Consulting Group hired the most MBAs To Watch, onboarding 9 in 2026. Bain & Company (5), McKinsey & Company (4), and Deloitte (4) also landed sizable shares of the class.

Who makes up this year’s MBAs To Watch? Many times, they didn’t follow the traditional business path. In July, Jennifer Sigl joined AMN Healthcare after earning her MBA at UC San Diego’s Rady School. Before business school, she produced a podcast on Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes that ranked as Apple’s top subscription offering of 2021. Julia Aabjerg Bratland, a graduate of Hong Kong University Business School, made her name in the music industry. While working for Sony Music, she co-founded a non-profit that supported music producers who were female, transgender, and non-binary. Eventually, this initiative turned out two producers with tracks that made the Danish Top 10 on Spotify. By the same token, Megan Dirgins has worked on Netflix documentaries for supermodels Naomi Campbell and Kate moss as an archivist. However, she says her career highlight involved partnering with Ron Howard on a documentary.

“What struck me the most was how present Ron was despite operating at an almost unimaginable pace,” writes Dirgins, a Warwick Business School grad. “At one point, he was working on multiple projects that required him to split his time between the East Coast, West Coast, Australia and Europe, yet whenever you were in a room or on a call with him, he was completely locked in. He was always deeply engaged, thoughtful, and generous with his attention. That level of focus and humility reshaped my expectations of what great leadership looks like and showed me what it truly means to operate at the very top of an industry.”

MAKING THE SWITCH TO CONSULTING, BANKING & TECH

IMD Business School boasted a celebrity of sorts. A national swimming champion in Germany, Oliver Zeidler decided to switch to rowing a decade ago. The result: He collected a gold medal in the 2024 Olympics for singles sculls, besting the reigning champion in the process. As an IMD MBA student, he earned a silver medal in the World Championships. To achieve that, Ziedler followed a regimen of “strict prioritization, discipline, and the determination to attempt something few people had tried before.” That said, Ziedler – who returned to Deloitte after graduation – was considered the most introspective of classmates, providing them with a welcome roadmap on the strategies to follow – and the mistakes to avoid.

“Learning from someone willing to share the whole journey, including the parts where the road bends, is a different and deeper kind of learning,” explains José Parra Moyano, a professor of digital strategy at IMD. “That is, at its heart, a growth mindset, and Oliver embodied it more fully than almost anyone I have taught. He understood, with a maturity that is difficult to teach, that the effort to understand matters as much as the answer you arrive at. He treated every stumble in his reasoning as information, every revision as progress…IMD made Oliver a better strategist. Oliver made IMD a better place.”

And business school made it possible for many MBAs To Watch to transition to new careers too. Just ask Hyemin Lee, a graduate of Boston College’s Carroll School. Her career started as a professional golfer in South Korea before she moved to AI and software development for a golf simulator. After earning her MBA, Lee will take another step, joining Adobe as a technical account manager. Serena Agrawal has spent the past two years at UCLA’s Anderson School, helping to lead the Healthcare Business Association before joining the Boston Consulting Group. Before that, she worked as an R&D engineer who was involved in designing a medical device that drew blood without relying on needle prices. In contrast, Victoria Sypher started out as a structural engineer whose claim to fame is designing a 60-story skyscraper.

“Right before I left to pursue my MBA, I was there for the building’s topping off,” writes Sypher, who graduated from the University of Toronto’s Rotman School and entered investment banking at TD Securities. “Watching something I actively designed come to life, and seeing how much my own role and responsibilities had grown from the ground up during that time, was a profoundly full-circle moment.”

FROM ARMY DISCIPLINE TO STARTUP CHAOS

Some MBAs To Watch made these transitions before business school. IESE Business School’s Rolayo Lasebikan began her career as a dentist before shifting to marketing, eventually being listed among the “Top 35 Marketing Professionals Under 35 in Nigeria.” In his native Japan, Akira Nagahara served as an appeals judge for the National Tax Tribunal, which he describes as a “neutral and independent third-party resolving tax disputes.” Trained as a lawyer and a CPA, Nagahara’s work ranged from international contracts to intellectual property, often requiring him to draft opinions that could run over 100 pages. Despite the prestige of being one of the youngest judges in his field, he moved to Singapore with his wife and two children to earn his MBA at Nanyang University. Through this process, he hopes to fulfill his dream: starting a Tokyo law firm.

“My strength lies in my dual qualifications in law and accounting, and my goal is to provide a broad range of services centred on business restructuring and tax, drawing on my professional experience,” he tells P&Q. “I believe that the business and global perspectives gained through the NTU MBA will enable me to deliver even higher-quality services.”

Among this year’s class, you’ll find a large contingent of military veterans. Before enrolling at Warwick Business School, Jack Wilkins worked in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps, which included training soldiers on military intelligence. Imagine the conversations he could have with Pat O’Brien, a U.S. Army counterintelligence special agent. At UCLA’s Anderson School, O’Brien built a cleantech startup that addresses water scarcity through “water purification and critical mineral recovery” technology.

“I co-founded NEXT TFX, a UCLA-incubated water technology company developing ultra-high-pressure membrane systems capable of reducing desalination energy costs by roughly 20-25%. Our mission is simple: transform seawater and waste brines into both fresh water and critical minerals. The company holds exclusive patent rights from UCLA, has raised early angel funding, and is advancing pilots with global partners.”

O’Brien wasn’t the only U.S. Army MBA to channel his energy into entrepreneurship. Seldon Warner, a former staff sergeant and infantry paratrooper, joined a startup while studying at the University of Maryland’s Smith School. He heads up strategy for Quantum Catalyzer, a venture studio devoted to turning scientific breakthroughs into ventures. It is a role, Warner says, that taps into his experiences serving in Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan.

“Raised with the grit of the Montana Badlands and forged as a Paratrooper on the frontlines of Afghanistan, I live by the creed that no one is more professional than I. My leadership is defined by an unwavering commitment to the mission and the welfare of those to my left and my right, demanding uncompromising excellence with no room for quit.”

HOPE THROUGH ENTREPRENEURSHIP

As a U.S. Army Artillery and Infantry Officer, Ty Millward completed deployments in areas like Syria, Finland, and Chile. Eventually, he found his way to Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School, where he led the Veterans Association and became an investment banker at Wells Fargo. Kathryn Kochevar followed the opposite path. A West Point grad, she headed overseas to HEC Paris, where she parented an infant daughter while her husband was deployed. Despite living in a foreign land where she didn’t have family or speak the language, Kochevar rose to the challenge and adapted. This success stemmed from pulling through an equally turbulent time, when she fractured her spine at West Point.

“I was no longer able to commission as an officer in the US Army as I had planned,” she tells P&Q. “I had never taken a business class and my summers were full of military training instead of internships, but suddenly, I needed to pivot. Within the span of a few months, I learned about consulting, case prepped like crazy, and received an offer to join Bain. In what was a very tumultuous time in my life, I’m incredibly proud that I was able to have grit, be resilient, and set a strong foundation for the rest of my new career.”

The Class of 2026 also found other ways to serve. Working for ExxonMobil, John Weldon volunteered for the Prison Entrepreneurship Program (PEP). Here, he worked one-on-one with over 50 participants, helping them refine their business plans – even judging subsequent competitions. For Weldon, who now works for GOOSE Capital after earning his MBA at Rice University’s Jones Graduate School, PEP reminded him of the value of providing hope and support to those who need it most.

“I witnessed families reunite on pitch day — some seeing their loved ones for the first time since incarceration. The emotion in those rooms was profound; you could see pride, hope and the belief that a new chapter was truly possible. After each class, I received handwritten letters from the men I supported, who shared how the program had changed their self-perception and future ambitions. Those letters remain some of the most meaningful reminders of the impact we can have when we lead with compassion and invest in others.”

Next Page: School Successes and Future Goals

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