Our Favorite MBAs In The Class of 2015
Katie Benintende was accustomed to being in the minority. As an undergrad, she majored in engineering, a traditionally male-dominated field. And she spent six years climbing the ranks in the Fortune 500, a place where women comprise just 14% of senior executives. When she decided to get an MBA, she picked the University of California-Berkeley due to the program’s “strong culture of diversity and inclusion.”
Yet, when she arrived on the leafy Northern California campus in the summer of 2013, she soon learned something that shocked her. In her entering class, women comprised just 29% of the incoming students, a drop from 32% the previous year. It didn’t take long for Benintende, 30, to find a cause and her voice. She helped to launch an initiative that brought together students, faculty and alumni to increase female enrollment, a touchy issue on business school campuses where women typically comprise little more than a third of the MBA students.
Undaunted, Benintende’s initiative enlisted classmates as ambassadors to talk up the school’s MBA program to other women, sponsored events to prospective female students, and persuaded high-powered female alumni and faculty to “close” women admits to get them to enroll. “I think we made enough noise to send a message that Haas lives up to its reputation for inclusion,” she now says. “After all that work, we were hoping to have an impact. Still, we were all stunned to learn that the incoming Class of 2016 exceeded all our expectations, with a record 43% women!”
That unique accomplishment, helping to make Haas the business school with the highest percentage of women in a full-time, highly selective MBA program, is what catapulted Benintende onto Poets&Quants’ inaugural list of the 50 best and brightest MBA graduates this year. Like the other extraordinary MBAs on the list, shepherded by staff writer Jeff Schmitt, Benintende distinguished herself by her demonstrated leadership, academic excellence, and personal qualities and contributions that resulted in real impact.
The best of the Class of 2015 is a rich and widely diverse group of talented young professionals who upend the stereotypes that MBAs are detached quants and sharp-elbowed climbers. They are former marines, athletes, actors, and lawyers. They have managed charities just as often as they’ve worked on Wall Street – and some have done both. And perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that women form a solid majority of the 50 graduates on the list, 27 women to the 23 men, at a time when males typically outnumber females two to one on business school campuses.
Which employers are getting the best grads? McKinsey & Co. and Deloitte Consulting are each employing four of the top 50. Amazon, Bain, Goldman Sachs, eBay, Google, and Citi are each hiring two. The upshot: 40% of the top 50 are going to one of only eight MBA employers. Yet, a surprising number of the best are launching their own firms or heading overseas to fight disease and poverty.
You’ll find these 50 MBAs hailing from locations as disparate as New Hampshire and the United Arab Emirates, with 15 students on the list born outside the United States. Although traditional powers like Harvard and Stanford are represented, you’ll find plenty of MBAs on the list who are graduating from public universities including Texas A&M, Purdue, Maryland, and Minnesota.
To compile this list, Poets&Quants surveyed 60 of the top-ranked full-time global MBA programs to find those 2015 graduates who “exemplify the best of your school” as evidenced by academic prowess, leadership in extracurricular activities, personal excellence, and striking personal narratives. Selected by administrators, faculty and fellow classmates, more than 100 forthcoming graduates were nominated. Each nominee was asked to complete an extensive questionnaire. We asked MBA students when they knew they wanted to go to business school and what they would be doing if they hadn’t gotten an MBA. We asked who would they most want to thank for their success and what they most enjoyed about their MBA experience (you can read their answers in the profiles).
The staff of Poets&Quants then carefully evaluated the submissions for academic achievement, leadership in extracurricular involvement, immediate impact, and engaging personal narratives to come up with the best of the bunch. The resulting profiles of each of the 50 most exceptional MBAs in the Class of 2015 are filled with a wealth of valuable information and intelligent insight for prospective students, current MBA candidates, and anyone interested in graduate business education.
Our winners and their stories:
Ramanuja Atur / Indiana University (Kelley)
Karthik Bagavathi Pandian / University of Toronto (Rotman)
Eric Barajas / Purdue University (Krannert)
Katherine Beaulieu / Ohio State University (Fisher)
Katie Benintende / University of California-Berkeley (Haas)
Kevin Bentley / Rice University (Jones)
Amy Bi / University of Toronto (Rotman)
Alexander Brown / Carnegie Mellon (Tepper)
Gina Bruno / Vanderbilt University (Owen)
Allyssa Callister / University of Minnesota (Carlson)
Kanika Chopra / University of Rochester (Simon)
Jenny Dare Paulin / University of Southern California (Marshall)
Sourya Datta / University of Pittsburgh (Katz)
Daniel Drummer / University of Oxford (Sa?d)
Benjamin Freedman / Yale School of Management
Ellen Gartner Phillips / Indiana University (Kelley)
David Hanley / University of Wisconsin
Ali Huberlie / Harvard Business School
Audrey Horn / University of Michigan (Ross)
Naomi Johnson / Emory University (Goizueta)
Anne-Marie Kruk / London Business School
Michaela LeBlanc / Dartmouth College (Tuck)
John Lockwood / Ohio State University (Fisher)
Taylor Mallard / University of North Carolina (Kenan-Flagler)
Michael Martin / Harvard Business School
Jennifer Meacham / New York University (Stern)
Blair Merlino / Boston University (Questrom)
Nikita Mitchell / University of California-Berkeley
Peter Nurnberg / Stanford Graduate School of Business
Geoff Nykin / Washington University (Olin)
Tim O'Neil / University of Minnesota (Carlson)
Elizabeth Owens / University of Notre Dame (Mendoza)
Nadine Payne / University of Maryland (Smith)
Robyn Peters / Texas A&M (Mays)
Derek Rey / University of Virginia (Darden)
Scott Schmidt / University of Iowa (Tippie)
Katlin Smith / University of Chicago (Booth)
Scott Sowanick / University of Texas (McCombs)
Miwa Takaki / Cornell University (Johnson)
Victoria Teworte / IESE Business School
Bering Tsang / Duke University (Fuqua)
Bruno Valle / Northwestern University (Kellogg)
George Wilson / Columbia Business School
John, Look back at BW in June 1968. They did a similar story but only on five schools including Tuck which I attended. Great reporting!
Adult educator phd
9 年It is my opinion that the bright moved into the business schools from medicine and law! Look at the % of women graduating in medicine? Tells the story clearly!! Could it be the starting wages? PL PHD