Racquets, Relocations, and Reinventions

Samantha Hallisey’s (MBA ‘26) global journey to HBS

Since before she can remember, squash has been a part of Samantha Hallisey’s life. Born and raised on Massachusetts’ South Shore to parents who met through the sport and played competitively well into adulthood, some of her earliest memories occurred on and around the court. Her father, a former captain of the US National Team and member of the US Squash Hall of Fame, served as the President of the Massachusetts Squash Association in her youth, meaning that she spent considerable time at tournaments. To keep her and her sister busy, her parents entered her into as many matches as possible, developing her skills but also establishing a “love / hate relationship” with the game—as she approached adolescence, she felt increasingly that the sport was pulling her away from other things she enjoyed.

This prevailing sense coincided with one of her first major life decisions. Since she was young, she’d dreamed of attending high school at Deerfield Academy. Situated in Western Massachusetts, two hours west of where she’d grown up, her father and older half-siblings were alums that remained involved and loyal post-graduation. As a result, Samantha had long “placed Deerfield on a pedestal,” using the dream of one day attending as motivation to achieve excellence both in the classroom and on the court. However, her mother preferred that she stay closer to home. Samantha remained undeterred and committed to her original goal, and she learned of her acceptance to Deerfield while away at a squash tournament. Much to her mother’s chagrin, she accepted her offer as soon as she could and soon thereafter was leaving home to begin the life she’d long dreamed of. 

Upon arriving, she realized that the experience was all that she’d expected and more. As one of 100 students who began at Deerfield as freshmen, she immediately immersed herself in all the school had to offer. As a boarding student, she met students from around the world and grew in other areas; Deerfield’s robust academic offerings broadened her horizons in the classroom, and the requirement that all students play a sport during every season allowed her to play soccer and lacrosse. However, her squash game in particular began to flourish—with the facility a two-minute walk from her dorm room, she no longer had to travel into Boston to find court time and competition. She’d always been ranked nationally, but she quickly began to rise even further. She was winning matches she hadn’t won before and beating players she used to lose to, and her progress resulted in invitations to play with the US Junior National Team, against Canada in 2013 and at the Pan American games in Argentina in 2015. As a result, she began to attract attention from college coaches, and the next phase of her journey began to reveal itself. 

In the United States, squash is known primarily as a niche sport, concentrated heavily in the Northeast. It’s certainly growing—it’s scheduled to make its Olympic debut in 2028—but it’s still small enough that the NCAA doesn’t sponsor a championship. As a result, there aren’t many schools that actually sponsor teams. So even though Samantha was one of the best players in the country, she still had to initiate her own recruiting process, attending scouting camps at schools of interest in the summers between her sophomore and junior years of high school. These visits allowed her to pare her list down to Yale, Stanford, and Princeton. When it came time to take official visits, Deerfield’s strict policy on absences made a West Coast trip infeasible during the school year, so she was limited to visiting Yale and Princeton prior to making her final decision. In the end, she felt most at home in New Jersey, so made the choice to adopt the orange and black and become a Tiger. 

Upon her arrival, she found the transition to be smooth. As a boarding school student, she was familiar with the cadence of campus life and thus faced few of the transitional struggles of her classmates who’d never before left home. Attracted by the broad array of post-graduate career options and academic flexibility it offered, she enrolled in what was then the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs while also taking on a minor in global health policy. And though she never could have anticipated it at the time, it was this sequence of decisions that would ultimately inform her unlikely post-graduate direction. 

As part of her enrollment in the Woodrow Wilson School, Samantha had access to Princeton-specific internships—many of which were overseas—throughout her time as a student. Having only ever lived in the Northeast US, this opportunity appealed to her. She took classes in Venice, Italy after her freshman year, but decided to broaden her horizons further and pursue a global health internship in Jaipur, India after her sophomore year. The work obviously aligned with some of her coursework, but she also saw this as an opportunity to visit a place she’d never been before and thought she’d never see again. With that in mind, she preemptively extended her trip on the front end so she could immerse herself in the culture and see more of the country. As she prepared to leave, she never could have imagined the profound impact this decision would have on her future. 

Upon arriving, she visited the city of Leh, located in the Indian Himalayas. The residents are ethnically Tibetan, and she was often confused for a local. She immediately found friends, one of whom had recently made a new, unapproved-by-her-parents boyfriend. This boyfriend had a motorcycle, so it worked perfectly for everyone—Samantha had two tour guides around the area, and the couple had an excuse to leave the house during the day and spend time with one another away from the prying eyes of their parents under the auspices of showing their new guest around. After experiencing Leh and the broader region, she continued on to a yoga ashram, and then to Delhi before starting her internship in Jaipur. 

She enjoyed her experience so much that she decided to return the following summer. Every senior at Princeton is required to write a comprehensive thesis in their specific area of study, and she chose to focus on immunization practices in India—in 2019, no less—so spent the summer prior to her senior year in Delhi, doing research and learning more about what life would be like in a place that was more and more starting to feel like home. 

All the while, her squash career continued. As a freshman, she quickly vaulted herself up the team’s depth chart and became a varsity contributor almost immediately. She continued on the improvement trajectory she’d started at Deerfield and played a pivotal role on a team that ultimately finished 2nd at Nationals. Perhaps more importantly, however, her relationship with the sport continued to evolve in a positive direction. No longer was it a source of pressure and something that took her away from her friends and other interests; it was a passion that could coexist with every other part of her life. She knew she wouldn’t go pro and that Princeton would be the last stop on this part of her journey, which allowed her to fully embrace each moment rather than worry about what was or was not to follow. 

This clarity allowed her to direct her focus towards her postgraduate plans, and she was committed to moving to India after completing her degree. Foreign worker visas can be difficult to come by, so her employment options were largely limited to large multinationals willing to take a chance on an American kid with no real connection to the region. As she looked for an opportunity, she leveraged any connection she had. The numbers game eventually paid off, and she found a role with Thermo Fisher Scientific through a squash connection. Through her search, however, she’d reestablished several relationships and began to build many more, allowing her to establish a group of friends and connections in India before she even arrived. As she prepared to move in the fall of 2019, she had no idea how valuable this community would become. 

As winter turned to spring in early 2020, Samantha was feeling settled in Mumbai. At the same time, however, the COVID-19 pandemic was intensifying across the world. The situation worsened in the US before it did in India, but her office transitioned to a hybrid model before aligning on a remote, “chasing the sun” model that allowed colleagues to work from all over the world. Unsurprisingly, Samantha felt compelled to return to the US, but struggled to find the “right time,” since the US and India appeared to be on contrasting cycles with the disease. She eventually found a window and packed a light bag, thinking she’d only be in the US for a couple of weeks. 

18 months later, she finally got back. The same disease cycles that kept her from getting home kept her from returning as planned, so she ended up spending time both at home in Massachusetts and with her now-husband’s family in Greenville, South Carolina, finding a remote work cadence that worked as well as it could have given the circumstances. She’d leveraged the connections she had in India to help her empty her apartment of her possessions after her lease expired, but was largely starting over upon her return. Many would have concluded the experiment at that point, but she felt like she had more to do in her adopted home. Newly interested in the startup ecosystem, she found a new role with the Times Group, India’s oldest and largest media company, which had a corporate VC arm that invested in American companies and helped them launch and scale in India.

She stayed there until February of 2024. After trying and failing to convince her then-fiance to move to India, she began to look for something that would allow them to live closer than half a world apart. At first, it was a joint MBA / International Relations program that emphasized cultural immersion and language proficiency that would allow her to maintain her focus on India. As she navigated the admissions process, however, she decided to apply to a few other schools. As she took her visits, she fell in love with HBS. 

And though she’s likely the only member of the Class of 2026 to ask admissions if she could take classes in Hindi as an MBA student (she’s currently enrolled in a year-long class at the College), she feels validated by her decision. She leveraged the HBS alumni database to make a career pivot to the hotel industry; after discovering a hospitality management company with operations in the US and India based in Greenville, South Carolina, where she plans to move after graduation, she convinced the owner to hire her as an intern last summer. Things went well enough for her to be asked back, so she’ll do that while growing her own personal business, Loopy Leopard Linens. The manifestation of a realization that she’d had planning her own wedding—that linens in India are more beautiful and less expensive than the ones she encountered in the US—it’s now a thriving operation with six wedding clients this year. And while you’d think that these two pursuits would be enough to keep her busy, there may well be more to come. 

John Mahoney (MBA ’26) is a native of West Des Moines, Iowa. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2021 with a degree in Finance. While in college, he was a walk-on defensive back for the Fighting Irish and wrote a book about his experience, titled History Through The Headsets. Prior to coming to HBS, John worked in consulting and strategy in Minneapolis and Chicago.