Business school can be a time to stretch your boundaries. No one knows this better than London Business School’s Alana Digby. As a first year, she juggled a full load of classes, along with serving as a peer leader and student ambassador. Behind the scenes, the Strategy& consultant was preparing for something even bigger: She planned to swim solo across the English Channel.
That’s no easy task, writes Poets&Quants' staff writer Jeff Schmitt in his exhaustive report on the top 100 graduating MBAs of the year. The legendary 21-mile trek from the White Cliffs of Dover to the golden beaches of Cap Gris Nez is considered the ultimate test of physical and mental endurance. A bustling shipping lane, the channel boasts 50-degree waters and thick fogs, not to mention fierce winds, dicey waves, and unforgiving tides that can yank swimmers miles off course or get them to quit.
Digby resisted the call, finishing the swim in less than 14 hours. She remembered the 15 hours of training she invested each week and everything she missed so she could savor her moment. Like her fellow MBAs, she pressed on when it would’ve been so much easier to give up. “When you are lonely, bored, tired and cold, you start to question why you are doing something, or whether you can do something,” Digby says. “These are dangerous thoughts, and my proudest achievement was learning to quash these bad thoughts and get on with my goal.”
Stamina is a defining virtue of the Class of 2017. Look no further than Northwestern’s Jared Scharen. At J.P. Morgan, he discovered that his true passion was consulting. Thinking big, he targeted McKinsey & Co. — knowing full well the firm had never hired a consultant from his alma mater without an MBA. After 52 McKinsey consultants refused to hear him out, Scharen reached someone who passed along his resume (on the condition that he stop calling). That opening was all the Villanova University undergrad needed. “Four interview rounds later, including one with a 103 degree fever, I became the first,” he beams.
Meet the Best & Brightest MBAs of 2017. Hailing from 59 business schools across the globe, the Class of 2017 may well be the best crop of business graduates ever. What makes them so special? They’re already role models. In school, they set the tone and expectations for classmates. They are the all-in difference makers, curious and galvanizing go-getters, eager to give back to others–refusing to fit into any stereotype of the young professionals who pursue a graduate degree in business.
Open. Passionate. Imaginative. Steadfast. These are virtues that united many of this year’s Best & Brightest MBAs. In 2015, Poets&Quants launched this series to celebrate high ceiling MBAs who personify excellence. If these 100 graduates are any indicator, the future is in exceptionally good hands. To compile the 2017 Best & Brightest MBAs, P&Q reached out to 63 full-time MBA programs, with only SDA Bocconi (due to a missed deadline) and Harvard Business School (citing what it believes is a conflict with internal awards) declining to participate. Schools were chosen based on their Poets&Quants’ ranking, with each program limited to four students for consideration.
Because academic cultures vary, the selection criteria was left up to the schools themselves. However, P&Q did suggest that the schools nominate students who exemplified the ideals of their programs, with measures potentially including “academic prowess, extracurricular achievements, innate intangibles and potential, or their unusual personal stories.” Even more, P&Q encouraged schools to factor student feedback into their selections. Nominated students then completed an entensive questionnaire, which documented both their academic and professional achievements, along with exploring their favorite classes, biggest regrets, and advice to prospective students. We even asked them about the changes they would make to MBA programs in general if they were dean for a day!. Overall, P&Q received 237 submissions, up from 197 the year before.
Looking at the big picture, P&Q’s 100 Best & Brightest are as diverse and colorful as they come. They hail from undergraduate programs ranging from the American University of Beirut to Kalamazoo College and locales as night-and-day as Ottawa, Kansas and Cape Town, South Africa. Their undergraduate and graduate degrees cover the usual disciplines, along with agriculture, nuclear engineering, art history, nursing, and astrophysics. And their work experience varies from Barclays to Teach For America to the CIA.
This year’s group boasts 53 women, a sizable number considering female representation in full-time programs stubbornly hovers around a third overall, topping out near 45% at leading programs like Wharton, Stanford, and Dartmouth. That said, this number is actually a small decrease over last year, when 57 women made the list. 32 students were also born outside the United States, the same number as 2016. The 2017 list also skews towards American schools, with just 15 students studying at overseas programs (though only 12 international MBA programs furnished submissions). By the same token, 15 military veterans made the list.
In terms of employment, the 2017 class was eerily similar to those on last year’s honor roll. McKinsey was again the big winner, hiring eight members of this year’s Best & Brightest, up from last year’s half dozen. McKinsey was followed by Deloitte Consulting (6), Amazon, Bain & Company, and the Boston Consulting Group (five each), and Citigroup (three). Another 15 students were still weighing offers or undecided as of early March, nearly identical to last year’s group (14). Entrepreneurship has continued to gain steam, with nine graduates planning to work at their own startups (a slight uptick from last year’s seven). Some 44 of the Best & Brightest graduates decided to return to the company where they interned, down just one from the 2016 list. However, there was one key area where the classes differed. This year’s crop tended to be slightly more risk-averse, with 59 graduates transitioning to different industries, down 11 from last year’s group. Another six students opted to return to their pre-MBA employers as well.
As they take the next step, we hope the Best & Brightest are blessed with the same experience as Stanford’s Federico Mossa. As the analytics director for a big three record label, Mossa was once tasked with shifting the company’s business model from retail CDs online downloads and streaming. Not surprisingly, Mossa helped the firm navigate this terrifying transition with aplomb. Before he headed off to Palo Alto, the label gave him a farewell gift: a framed platinum record of Abbey Road. However, it was the inscription that touched Mossa and serves as the reminder of the true mission and rewards of being an MBA graduate:
“Thanks for making sense of our business.”
Congratulations, Best & Brightest. Make whatever you do matter.
