Best & Brightest MBAs: Andrew Ward of the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business
Andrew Ward is still pinching himself over the fact that he was able to defer a job at The Boston Consulting Group for a year in order to spend 12 months working at Brigham and Women’s Hospital after graduating from Chicago Booth this year. Of course, he's also one exceptional person, one of our best & brightest MBAs of 2017.
"I’m incredibly enthusiastic about the healthcare space, particularly the pharmaceutical industry and healthcare providers, and feel incredibly lucky to be spending next year learning and experiencing everything that an academic medical center has to offer," says Ward, who has a BS in mechanical engineering and a an MS in biomedical engineering from Tufts University. "As a Deland Fellow, I look forward to shadowing nurses while they make their daily rounds, scrubbing down and sitting in on kidney surgeries, optimizing operations in surgery centers, and sitting across from the CEO while discussing potential acquisition targets and long-term growth strategies for the hospital."
And then, he'll join BCG, even though he had interned at Bain & Co. over last summer. "Not only was BCG incredibly supportive of my decision to postpone my start date one year so that I could continue my development and education in the healthcare space, but their Boston office also offers a ton of opportunities for me to work in both the pharmaceutical and healthcare provider industries," he says.
“I knew I wanted to go to business school when… I left the engineering world and moved into the business world. I was now living in a new domain in which I didn’t really speak the language because I had never taken an accounting, marketing, or finance course. I took the CFA level I and bought a finance textbook to try and “get smart,” but found that these would never be enough. I needed to go back to school.”
“If I hadn’t gone to business school, I would be pursuing a PhD. If I had stayed in engineering, my dream would have been a career in bioinformatics (hybrid of computer science and biology).”
What did you enjoy most about business school in general? I have really enjoyed the interpersonal development and growth that I have experienced at Booth. A common misconception about business school that I carried with me to Booth is that all of the learning occurs in the classroom. For most of my life, I was always very forward looking and hardly ever took the time to be introspective or reflect on anything important. However, through its standard leadership training program (LEAD) and the Distinguished Fellows program, Booth has encouraged me to take a deep introspective look at understanding myself. I used to think that self-awareness meant simply looking in a mirror and being able to catalog every one of my traits. I now define self-awareness as also being able to answer the question “why?” for every trait. Why do I feel this way or behave that way? This level of reflection was initially sparked during the Booth admissions process, when the essay I chose to write really forced me to take a deeper look at myself and unpack many things that had previously been swept under the rug. I believe that these personal developments have played a large part in my decisions to get involved with Common Chromosome, become a BoothInsights Leader, and an Admissions Fellow.
What was the most surprising thing about business school for you? It is amazing to me that you can take 600 people who are individually very ambitious, throw them into a 2-year MBA program with all the competitive drivers of classes and recruiting, and still have a school culture that is incredibly supportive. Booth has an amazing “pay it forward” mentality that generates a tremendous amount of goodwill and support for students. Every single Boothie truly wants every other Boothie to succeed and I have never heard of one Boothie asking for help and not receiving it. Some of my closest friends from my first year were people who I was directly competing against for healthcare and consulting jobs, but we still supported one another by giving each other practice case interviews and making sure we all made it to networking events on time. I also received tremendous mentorship and coaching from students who were in the year ahead of me. As part of my “paying it forward,” I gave over 30 practice case interviews to first year students during the first 2 weeks of winter quarter. This level of paying it forward is entirely normal at Booth and even extends out to our incredibly supportive alumni community.
What is the biggest myth about your school? I have heard that some people think that we don’t have a very tight knit community because most students live off campus. This couldn’t be more of a myth. Nearly the entire class lives within the same 2-block radius in downtown Chicago in what I consider to be one of the most exciting and fun neighborhoods that you can live in while attending business school.
Meet all of Poets&Quants' 100 Best & Brightest MBA Graduates of 2017