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The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced Editor’s Note: Published in 1889, The Gospel of Wealth  is considered the founding document of modern philanthropy. Written at the height of wealth inequality during the Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie’s essay represents well the “do good and do well” ethos that is now commonplace in the modern business school. Below is an abridged version edited by The Harbus  for brevity and clarity. We ask our readers to look past Carnegie’s dated language, to evaluate his argument on its own merits, and to come to your own conclusions. The full essay, which belongs to the public domain, can be accessed online on the Carnegie Corporation’s website. * The problem of our age is the proper administration of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship. The conditions of human life have not only been changed, but revolutionized, within the past few hundred years. In former days there was little difference between the home, clothing, food, and environment of the ruler and those of his subjects. The contrast between the palace of the millionaire and the cottage of the laborer with us today reveals the change which has come with modern civilization. This change, however, is not to be deplored, but welcomed as highly beneficial.  It is well, nay, essential for the progress of the race, that the houses of some should be homes for the greatest literature and the arts, and for all the refinements of civilization, rather than that none should be so. Much better this great inequality than universal poverty. Without wealth there can be no Mæcenas (patron of the arts under Augustus, the first Roman emperor). The "good old times" were not good old times. Neither master nor servant was as well off then as today. Relapsing to old conditions would be disastrous to both — not least so to the servant — and would sweep away civilization with it. But whether the change be for good or ill, it is upon us. It is beyond our power to alter, and therefore to be accepted and made the best out of. It is a waste of time to criticize the inevitable. In the manufacture of products we have the whole story. It applies to all combinations of human industry, as stimulated and enlarged by the inventions of this scientific age. Formerly, goods were manufactured at the domestic hearth or in small shops which formed part of the household. The master and his apprentices worked and lived side by side, therefore subject to the same conditions. When these apprentices eventually became masters, there was little or no change in their way of life, and so they, in turn, educated the next apprentices in the same routine. There was, substantially, social equality, and even political equality, for those working in industry back then had little or no political voice in the government. But the inevitable result of this mode of manufacture was crude goods at high prices.  Today, the world obtains high-quality, yet commoditized goods at prices which even the generation preceding ours would have found incredible. In the commercial world, similar causes have produced similar results, and humanity thus benefits. The poor enjoy what the rich could not before afford. What were the luxuries have become the necessaries of life. The laborer has now more comforts than the landlord had a few generations ago.  The farmer has more luxuries than the landlord had, and is more richly dressed and better housed. The landlord has rarer books and pictures, and home furnishings more artistic, than even the King could then obtain. The price we pay for this change is, no doubt, great. We assemble thousands of laborers in the factory, in the mine, and in the counting-house, of whom the employer can know little or nothing, and to whom the employer is little better than a myth. All dialogue between them is at an end. Rigid castes form, and mutual ignorance breeds mutual distrust. Each caste has no sympathy for the other, and is ready to disparage the other at any time. Under the law of competition, the employer of thousands is forced into strict economic discipline. As the cost of labor features prominently in this discipline, there is consequently friction between the employer and the employed, between capital and labor, between rich and poor.  Yet the advantages of the law of competition are greater still, for to this law we owe our wonderful material development and the improved conditions it makes real. This law is here; we cannot evade it; no substitute has been found; and though often hard upon individuals, it is best for humanity, since it ensures the survival of the fittest. From this follows inequality of environment, the concentration of business in the hands of a few, and the inevitable accumulation of wealth by men possessing rare, special talent for organization and management — men whose ability creates capital and without whom capital takes flight and disappears. Objections to these foundations are unfounded. Civilization itself rests upon the sacredness of property — the right of the laborer to his savings, and equally, the legal right of the millionaire to his millions. Communism has been tried, and progress has come from communism’s displacement. Even if a nobler ideal imagines men laboring wholly for one another, this is not evolution, but revolution. Our duty is not to uproot existing institutions, but to bend the universal tree of humanity slightly toward better fruit. We start, then, with a condition of affairs under which the best interests of the race are promoted, but which inevitably gives wealth to the few. The question then arises: What is the proper mode of administering wealth after the laws upon which civilization is founded have thrown it into the hands of the few? And it is of this great question that I believe I offer the true solution. It will be understood that fortunes are here spoken of, not moderate sums saved by many years of effort, the returns on which are required for the comfortable maintenance and education of families. This is not wealth, but only competence which it should be the aim of all to acquire. There are but three ways in which surplus wealth can be disposed of. It can be left to the families of the descendants; or it can be bequeathed for public purposes; or, finally, it can be administered during their lives by its possessors. Under the first and second ways most of the wealth of the world that has reached the few has hitherto been applied. Let us in turn consider each of these modes.  The first is the most injudicious. In monarchical countries, the estates and the greatest share of wealth is left to the next generation, that the vanity of the parent may be soothed by the thought that his name and title will be passed on, unimpaired, to succeeding generations. Under republican institutions, the division of property among children is much fairer, but then a question forces itself upon thoughtful men worldwide: Why should men leave great fortunes to their children? If this is done from affection, is it not misguided affection? Observation teaches that, generally speaking, it is not good for the children that they should be so burdened by unearned wealth. Neither is it good for the state. Wise men will soon conclude that, for the best interests of their family and of the state, such giving is an improper use of wealth. The thoughtful man must shortly say, "I would as soon leave to my son a curse as the almighty dollar," and admit to himself that it is not the welfare of the children, but pride, which inspires generational wealth. As to the second way, that of leaving wealth at death for public uses, it may be said that this is only a means for the disposal of wealth, provided a man is content to wait until he is dead before it becomes of much good in the world. There are many cases in which the goals of the giver are not attained, and there are many in which his goals are thwarted. In many cases the money given is so used as to become only monuments of his folly. It is good to remember that it requires ability equal to that which acquired the wealth, to use it so as to be actually beneficial to the community. Besides this, it may fairly be said that no man is to be praised for doing what he cannot help doing, nor is he to be thanked by the community to which he only leaves wealth at death. Men who leave vast sums in this way may be thought of as men who would not have left it at all, had they been able to take it with them. The memories of such cannot be held in grateful remembrance, for there is no grace in their gifts. The growing disposition to tax more and more heavily large estates left at death is a cheering indication of the growing positive change in public opinion. The State of Pennsylvania now takes one-tenth of the property left by its citizens. The budget presented in the British Parliament the other day proposes to increase the death-duties; and, most significant of all, it proposes a progressive tax. Of all forms of taxation, this seems the wisest. Men who continue hoarding great sums all their lives, the proper use of which for public ends would work good to the community, should be made to feel that the community, in the form of the state, cannot thus be deprived of its proper share. By taxing estates heavily at death the state marks its condemnation of the selfish millionaire's unworthy life. It is desirable that nations should go much further in this direction. Indeed, it is difficult to set bounds to the share of a rich man's estate which should go at his death to the public through the agency of the state, and by all means such taxes should be progressive, beginning at nothing upon moderate sums to dependents, and increasing rapidly as the amounts swell, until of the millionaire's hoard, as of Shylock's in Shakespeare, at least "The other half comes to the privy coffer of the state." This policy would work powerfully to incentivize the rich man to distribute his wealth while he is alive, which is the end that society should always support, as this is most fruitful for the people. Nor should it be feared that this policy would sap the root of enterprise and render men less willing to chase wealth, for to that group whose aspires to leave great fortunes and be talked about after death, it will attract even more attention. Indeed, for them it may be an even nobler ambition to have enormous sums paid over to the state from their fortunes. There remains, then, only one way to use great fortunes; but in this we have the true antidote for the temporary unequal distribution of wealth, the reconciliation of and harmony between the rich and the poor — an ideal differing from that of the Communists in requiring only the further evolution of our current condition, not the total overthrow of our civilization. It is founded upon today’s intense individualism, and humanity is projected to put it in practice. Under its sway we shall have an ideal state, in which the surplus wealth of the few will become, in the best sense, the property of the many — because it is administered for the common good. This wealth, passing through the hands of the few, is more potent for humanity’s elevation than if the wealth had been distributed in small checks to the people themselves. Great sums gathered by some of their fellow-citizens and spent for public purposes, from which the masses reap the principal benefit, are more valuable to them than being distributed piecemeal. In charity, the main consideration should be to help those who will help themselves; to give those who desire to use the aid by which they may rise; to assist, but rarely or never to do all on their behalf. Those worthy of assistance, except in rare cases, seldom require assistance. The really valuable men of humanity never do, except in cases of accident or sudden change. Every one has, of course, cases of individuals brought to his own knowledge where temporary assistance can do genuine good, and these he will not overlook. But the amount which can be wisely given by the individual for individuals is necessarily limited by his lack of knowledge of the circumstances connected with each. He is the only true reformer who is as careful and as anxious not to aid the unworthy as he is to aid the worthy, and, perhaps, even more so, for in almsgiving more injury is probably done by rewarding vice than by relieving virtue. Thus is the problem of Rich and Poor to be solved. The laws of accumulation will be left free; the laws of distribution free. Individualism will continue, but the millionaire will be but a trustee for the poor; entrusted for a little while with a great part of the increased wealth of the community, but administering it for the community far better than it could or would have done for itself. The best minds will reach a stage in humanity’s development where it becomes clear that there is no way to dispose of excess wealth other than by using it — year over year — for the general good. This day already dawns. A man may die with some shares locked up in great enterprises without incurring scorn or pity, especially if his wealth is ultimately dedicated to the public interest. But the man who dies leaving vast sums of available wealth — wealth he might have administered in life — will pass away unwept, unhonored, and unsung, no matter even if it is to the public interest that his will dedicates his wealth, for he hoarded rather than acted while he was living. Of these men, the public verdict will then be:  "The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced." Such, in my opinion, is the true Gospel concerning Wealth, obedience to which is destined some day to solve the problem of the Rich and the Poor, and to bring "Peace on earth, among men good will." Andrew Carnegie   led the development of the United States’ steel industry during the Gilded Age. He was one of its richest men and foremost philanthropists. During his life, he gave away roughly ninety percent of his fortune to charity in such areas as education and the cause of international peace.

In a free speech incident on November 6, 2002 that drew national attention, Nick Will resigned from his position as Editor-in-Chief at The Harbus . Forty-eight hours prior, the Dean of Harvard Business School and several senior staff had called him into a 7a.m. Monday morning meeting to discuss the newspaper’s publication of a controversial cartoon. The cartoon—whose primary target was the persistent malfunctioning of HBS’s Career Link interview platform, 12Twenty’s distant ancestor—referred to it as “CareerDink” and Career Services staff as “incompetent morons.” Publishing negative coverage in a newspaper, especially at HBS, could be the easiest decision in the world, if one is a free speech absolutist; harder, if one is an institutionalist. Such decisions, however, are usually protected by the First Amendment. “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” This is the necessary condition upon which all independent newspapers are founded, The Harbus being little exception. When, however, does this paper choose to exercise its right? It is a question of editorial judgment. My thoughts on the matter are as follows. Past performance, contrary to investing wisdom, is a decent guarantee of future results. There will always be administrative imbroglios, communications fiascos, groundswells of popular complaint. There will always, too, be students that interpret standards as mere suggestions, or students that break rules in bad faith. Nothing is new under the sun. I concern myself less with pondering if these incidents happen, but rather how they are addressed and resolved—particularly, how relevant parties engage with change, and what role free speech in public plays in that change. While nothing like the 2002 cartoon appears in this issue, we must set forth one principle. Understand that closed-door dialogue cannot always meet the demands of the moment. There is merit in public discourse, even occasionally inflammatory public discourse, for the rare rearing of the latter’s ugly head reveals where frustration curdles into anger—a signaling anger that, like the inversion of the yield curve, clearly tells the other party: “You must change course.” This contact catalyzes a deeper understanding of the productive path forward. The front cover of this paper features issues that have brought consternation to many members of our community over the last month. We have heard the administration’s revised weather policy, which was communicated through a meeting with Student Association and section representatives, as well as to the broader student body over an email blast last Friday evening. I encourage you to read it. Deans Datar and Crispi should be lauded for their responsiveness, their willingness to admit error, and their clarity of action looking forward. Some of these elements were missing in the fall of 2002. That said, what our community has not heard—and what this issue provides—is students’ opinions beyond policy feedback, in the form of an op-ed and satire. Critically, in this environs and others like it, The Harbus  does not endorse any one faction, even if its content seems to. Our pages merely elevate those who decide to speak. We serve as a forum for free exchange: a marketplace of ideas any can choose to participate in. So long as every stall is set up in good faith, our marketplace operates in good order. None of this issue’s perspectives, in our judgment, upends that principle. Now, moving on:   There are other interesting items in this paper that do not deserve to be swallowed by the news of the day. First, congratulations are in order to Dimitri Henry and Akaash Preetham, our newest Student Association Co-Presidents. The Harbus  had the opportunity last week to moderate a town hall for them alongside Kevin Truong and Brianna Rivera—all of whom put in valiant effort into their campaigns. You will hear from those upon whose work the incoming SA administration will build next year. In this issue, our EC leadership describes their forward posture as well as priorities set and achieved during their term. Reading along, you will also find a reflection on our relationship with time; writing on the ethics of wealth; alumni stories on how they landed their jobs in tech; an op-ed against the Pentagon’s decision to sever its relationship with Harvard; a profile of a student athlete; an archival feature from 2016 on HBS community reactions during the presidential election; and more. Student perspectives abound. Of additional note is our edited, abridged version of Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” which we believe is valuable reading for those both familiar and not. Some of you may read this paper and think its agenda has an ideological bent. Some of you may read our columns and fear your writing does not match their tenor. I am looking, specifically, at you, my Friedman-loving finance brothers and sisters; and you, campus conservatives and libertarians, who are brow-beat in every class by majoritarian finger-wagging. Send forth a challenge to the paradigm and let us publish it. Our philosophy is fairly simple. Say the thing. Do the difficult work of forming a view and submitting it to others. Let it be disciplined—applauded, improved, defeated in the free market; let ego detach itself from outcome. In the long run, Schumpeter’s creative destruction will lay beautiful waste to all our ideas. We will hence be better off for it. Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.

Why Snowstorms, Schedules, and Student Autonomy Pose Strategic Risks There is something touching about the way HBS protects us from ourselves. Other schools gamble on their student’s judgment, trusting adults in their late twenties and early thirties to interpret weather advisories, manage competing obligations, and allocate their own time. But HBS remains vigilant. It understands that if left unsupervised, we would squander our time and fail to fully grasp the value of this MBA experience. We would schedule coffee chats, attend conferences and speaker events, travel on the weekends, or god forbid, even cross register for classes. So HBS does what any steward of future leaders would do and governs with dutiful skepticism. This is not accidental. The in-person classroom experience is the crown jewel of the HBS value proposition. This is its brand, and its key differentiator amongst competitors. Once constructed, brands vigorously defend themselves against dilution. If students could openly treat the classroom as one among many valuable uses of time, it would become subject to comparison. If it must compete with recruiting, relationships, speaker events, and personal well-being, it may not always come out on top. It is less risky to preserve the supremacy and sanctity of the classroom through strictness and structure than to acknowledge that a modern MBA contains multiple legitimate paths to value. It is less risky to defend the brand as we know it today than to evolve it. This has become visible during recent meteorological events of biblical proportions. As snow piled up, states of emergency were issued, flights were grounded, and state authorities advised residents to stay off the roads, HBS performed its time honored ritual of waiting to cancel in-person classes. Premature cancellation could signal flexibility, or worse, a clear prioritization of student, professor, and staff safety. Instead, cancellation announcements arrived at dawn, when those commuting from the furthest reaches already had hit the road. We should all feel grateful that HBS is looking out for us. Ensuring we are sat in Aldrich to contemplate the innovations in VC organizational structures is unequivocally worth the risk of two thousand students being blown into the Charles River or fishtailing out on I-90. It is not indecision but commitment to pedagogy.  This same commitment governs the calendar. For years, students have attempted to raise the heretical notion that schedules could be standardized, perhaps even where the same classes are on the same sets of days at the same times. In such a world, life could be planned with something approaching coherence. Others have proposed a regularly recurring half-day or full day off to accommodate recruiting meetings, interviews, or other activities pertaining to the distinctly non-MBA related pursuit of post-graduation employment. These suggestions are received with bemused confusion and polite pats on the head.  And I get it, truly. Predictability is dangerous. With predictability comes the ability to plan, increased autonomy, and the destabilizing possibility that students might allocate their time in ways not centrally ordained. A standardized schedule would imply that HBS believes students can prioritize and balance their commitments responsibly. A protected recruiting block would imply that career development is not an extracurricular activity to be shoe-horned in, but a legitimate component of the MBA experience. Once autonomy is legitimized, leverage is forfeited. The system is not designed assuming good faith behavior. Policies are optimized for the hypothetical worst-case student rather than the well-above-average adult professional. This is ironic because the purpose of this graduate institution is ostensibly to produce leaders. We are taught to design organizations around trust, incentives, and accountability. We do case studies on firms that empower employees and flatten hierarchies. We discuss the cost of misaligned assumptions. And then we collectively refresh our inboxes at 7:32 a.m., awaiting acknowledgement of the first blizzard to hit Boston in ten years and the two feet of snow accumulating outside our windows. The question is not whether the classroom matters, because it does. Students still schlep to school in the snow despite declared state emergencies. Students deeply appreciate the quality of the education and engage enthusiastically in the classroom. HBS remains the premier business school in the world and a magnet for global talent. The question is rather whether its perception of its own value is so fragile that it cannot accommodate a standardized schedule, a more proactive snow storm policy, or a recurring free afternoon for recruiting. If the case method produces leaders capable of running multinational enterprises, I would hazard it might also produce adults capable of managing their calendars. The author has requested to remain anonymous.

The case against your calendar There's one relationship on campus that nobody talks about. It's controlling, codependent, and entirely one-sided. Chances are you've been in this relationship for years, but at HBS you've taken it to the next level. It’s always on your mind. First thing in the morning, last thing at night, every few minutes in between. You've built your entire identity around managing this relationship well, and yet it’s never felt closer to slipping from your grasp. Like any toxic relationship, you tell yourself, over and over again, that everything will be fine if you can just get a little bit more of it. I'm talking, of course, about your relationship with time. Consider this an intervention. Your family, friends, and partner have been trying to tell you for years—to no avail. As with any diagnosis, the first step is admitting you have a problem. Amortizing 645 Days If the United States is the most time-obsessed place on earth, HBS is its capital. As you settle into your seat during the first few moments of START Week, a massive number flashes across the Klarman screen: 645 days. That's how long you have until graduation. On your first day of class, you're taught the 5 Ps, one of which is "Punctual: we start and end on time.” (Results may vary. Some professors will kick you out of class if you're late. Others have a loose relationship with the end time. A select few manage both. The duality of man!) You're then told that, on average, you'll need at least two hours to prepare for each case. Looking at your schedule, you notice a uniquely HBS affinity for back-to-back 3-case days.  Net discretionary life expectancy: two to three hours daily, optimistically. Oh, and by the way, you have to meet with your discussion group at 8 AM. And find a job. And exercise. And be a present spouse and parent, if applicable.  As you depart from Aldrich in a zombie-like fugue and trudge home, a shroud of drowsiness descends upon you. The mentality is hardwired into our physical environment: the SFP elevator doors are programmed to grant you a 0.025-second reaction window before slamming shut on your sides and jolting you awake. The campus vibrates with the quiet aggression of optimization. Every minute matters. You’re wasting one right now.  You hold out hope. You think to yourself, at least my classmates and I are in it together; we can #jointheresistance . Your algorithm feeds you a Reel about manipulating time and you almost want to believe it. You finally move beyond the superficial pleasantries and set up your first one-on-one lunch – a bona fide bonding experience. And then you spot a casual glance from your newest “friend” in the direction of their wrist. Two or three thinly-veiled glances follow in short succession, and the veil of innocence is pierced when the words "hard stop" echo in your ears.  After a few rounds, you decide not to take it personally. The choreographed dance of these conversations lets people play the game they came for. Your author keeps the faith in a beautiful, purposeless lunch hang, but many of these conversations start with a goal in mind. They are efficient transactions disguised as friendship auditions. Time is our scarcest resource. The hamster yearns for the wheel. Are you worth my time?  Let's set up a 25-minute lunch to find out. The Cult of Chronos The Ancient Greeks understood time well enough to split it into two words. Chronos is measured, sequential, and quantitative—the time of calendars and case prep. Kairos , conversely, is qualitative and descriptive of the right time for action (sometimes called "God's time"). It concerns not how much time passes, but whether the moment matters. In other words, every Kairos is a Chronos, but not every Chronos is a Kairos. The mythology really drove the point home. The titan Kronos devoured his own children, terrified that what he created would one day overtake him. But Kronos missed one. There’s always a Zeus.  HBS is Chronos Central.  Productivity culture has inherited the instinct of consuming our own time before it can consume us. We schedule, optimize, and account for every hour. At the West Point of Capitalism: "Time is money" and busyness reigns supreme. The relentless march of time is ubiquitous across idioms such as, "Don't waste time" and "Time waits for no one." It's no accident that the Spanish word for business— negocio —literally means the denial of leisure. When we're not producing output, we're "killing time." Is time of no worth on its own? Philosopher Josef Pieper argued that real leisure isn't idleness, but rather receptivity, or the capacity to let the world speak to you instead of constantly imposing yourself upon it. By that definition, most of what we call leisure is just a different kind of productivity. But the moments that have defined the HBS experience, at least for me, are unequivocally Kairos: long, winding, and unexpected conversations, friendships formed in unplanned settings, and scattered moments of spontaneity. One particular memory stands out: Section C's Flag Day during RC Year. What was supposed to last ninety minutes somehow went over five hours . We violated the 5 Ps. Nobody complained.  Intellectual Foie Gras How did we get here? Turns out, someone called it over forty years ago.  In the 80s, Neil Postman published Amusing Ourselves to Death , in which he argued that society was worried about the wrong dystopia. The collective psyche envisioned a bleak future in the shape of Orwell’s 1984 , where truth is suppressed by force. Postman pointed to Huxley’s Brave New World instead, describing something more insidious: a world where truth is drowned in irrelevance. Nobody needs to ban books if nobody wants to read them. Nobody needs to surveil your thoughts if you've stopped having them. Orwell feared that what we hate would destroy us. Huxley feared that what we love would. Postman's verdict was that Huxley got it right, and I think the decades since have only strengthened the case. The danger isn't that your information is restricted; it’s the opposite. Consumer culture floods you with so much information that signal becomes indistinguishable from noise. Drowning in a sea of riches, we have been reduced to passivity and egotism. It's a cruel and clever trick. Like moths to a flame, we give our freedom away willingly. HBS exemplifies the Huxleyan dystopia. The volume of options, events, treks, clubs, recruiting timelines, and socials is nominally good, but in aggregate these options compete for our attention to such a degree that it becomes easy to lose sight of what's actually important. Nobody is being forced to fill their calendar, but when you combine the environmental conditions with the selection bias of nearly two thousand type-A strivers, you create a self-reinforcing cycle. Poverty in Abundance Why do 80% of Americans report feeling "time poor "—this unrelenting feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to get around to them? The American Time Use Survey suggests that Americans actually have more discretionary time today  than they did fifty years ago. The average American logs over five hours a day in leisure activities, with more than half going to watching TV. In other words, 80% of Americans are wrong—right? We've never had more free time. We just don't feel that way because our free time has been shredded into what HBS Professor Ashley Whillans calls " time confetti ,” composed of tiny, distracted, low-quality slivers scattered between obligations and screens. We're time-rich and meaning-poor.  I know what you're thinking. Who does this author think he is? Be careful throwing stones from glass houses, and all that. I get it; my country is literally on fire right now. My friends here know that “Mexican time” means I’ll show up when I want to, not when I said I would. But one thing we do get right is sobremesa. There's no English equivalent, but it refers to the time spent lingering at the table after a meal—talking, digesting, letting a conversation unfold at its own pace. No one is optimizing. No one is checking their phone. In Mexico, getting up to leave as soon as a meal is done would be considered rude. Here, eating alone at your desk in eight minutes while answering emails is called efficiency. Sobremesa is the opposite of time confetti. It's time given room to become something. The Myth of Having it All HBS is the distilled essence of this uniquely American pathology. Nowhere else will you find a higher density of people who believe, sincerely and to their core, that every minute must be optimized. The program's tendency to feel overwhelming is clearly a feature, not a bug. It's a noble goal: prepare leaders to make decisions with imperfect information, competing priorities, and restrictive constraints. But if the goal is to prepare leaders, shouldn’t we question whether treating every minute as a resource to be optimized is actually good leadership, or just a habit we’ve mistaken for one? Every semester, founders, CEOs, and leaders of every ilk visit campus. A common question from students goes something along the lines of: "How do you balance everything?" More often than not, the answer—delivered with weary honesty—is: you don't . It can be world-shattering for some students to hear, but it's a bracing corrective to the relentless peddling of the notion that you can and should have it all. Aren't we taught that success is results multiplied by expectations? We might be setting ourselves up to fail.  But our awakening is short-lived. Our memories, like our attention spans, are fractured. We nod, file it away, and go back to scheduling our next hard stop. Because admitting that optimization is unwinnable would mean confronting the uncomfortable reality that perhaps we've been operating under the wrong premise all along. This American pathology has its merits. It has powered the ascent of the richest and most ambitious country on earth. But prosperity has its own tab. Loneliness is an official epidemic, with health effects comparable to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day. Over half of Americans report feeling lonely . Community participation, religious attendance, and close friendships have all declined for decades. We've built the most productive society in human history, and we're too busy—and too isolated—to enjoy it. At some point, you have to ask whether the price of admission is worth it. Deferred Maintenance I struggle with this myself. Prioritizing productivity is always easy to justify. When I’m with my family, it can be tempting to want to slip away and pour myself into some seemingly noble pursuit that, I tell myself, will ultimately benefit them. But relationships are about showing up, and I’ve come to appreciate that deferred maintenance is as catastrophic for people as it is for businesses. Foundations are not laid in a single pour, and no amount of heroics can substitute for the ordinary days you let slide. We keep treating the hard, mundane parts—the ones that actually build something worthwhile—as obstacles to get past rather than the point in and of themselves. By the time this is published, we'll be about halfway through our last semester as ECs, and then it's back to the real world. As we are put out to pasture, it is worth reminding the RCs of obligatory clichés about how objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. For many of us, this will be the last experience of its kind. When else will we be surrounded by so many people we enjoy, who share our ambitions, and who we already know we won't see enough of in the years ahead? Coming to HBS confirmed my lifelong suspicion that the true value of an MBA program lies in its people. Not in the transactional, network-building sense, but something more akin to Kant’s categorical imperative. I’d bet (good odds on Polymarket) the moments we’ve spent inhabiting time for its own sake are , in fact, our most cherished memories from this experience.  Not every hour needs to justify itself. The best ones never do. Santiago Gil Gallardo (MBA ‘26) is originally from Mexico City. He graduated from Tecnológico de Monterrey with a degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Before HBS, he worked in venture capital at IGNIA and investment banking at a boutique firm in Mexico City.

Looking back at HBS through the voices of those about to leave “I didn’t think; I experimented.” Anthony Burgess As I sat with my hands on my keyboard and a blank document in front of me, I stared at the screen and wondered what my next Harbus article would be/could be/should be about. And then it struck me: this might be my last write-up for something that has been quietly therapeutic over the past year–writing for the HBS community. If this indeed was going to be my final piece as a student, what should it say? What would my peers/the HBS community want to read? What might RCs learn from? What could incoming students carry with them before they even step into Aldrich? Instead of projecting my own reflections, I decided to source them straight from the horse’s mouth. I reached out to friends navigating the final stretch of their HBS journey, and asked them a simple set of questions. I invited them to look back on their time at HBS so far, how the journey has shaped up, what defined it, and how they’re thinking about the road ahead. Their answers were honest, varied, and deeply relatable. While no two experiences were identical, a few themes emerged. 1. Professional Growth For many, HBS began with a career hypothesis. One EC came determined to pivot from consulting into technology. She experimented with an early-stage startup, realized it wasn’t the right fit, and ultimately found her way into corporate strategy at a more established tech firm. For her, HBS provided a safe sandbox to test assumptions and recalibrate without irreversible consequences. Another arrived intent on entrepreneurship and leaves on the cusp of launching a startup, twists and turns included. “Relationships and entrepreneurship were always the two pillars,” she shared. Both, she feels, are on track. Others came with less precision. One peer candidly admitted she underestimated how overwhelming recruiting would be, particularly navigating U.S. hiring dynamics and a tough job market. In hindsight, she now understands why admissions pushes for clarity: knowing your target industry, role, and priorities before arriving is, in some ways, deliberate and strategic. And then there was the EC who said something that lingered with me: HBS didn’t just shape his career, it changed “the scale of his ambition.” Surrounded by people who believe they can build generational companies, reshape industries, or redefine impact, he found his own ceiling lifted. The first step to success, he reflected, is believing you can do something of that scale in the first place, and HBS as a community pushed him to do that. Professional outcomes varied. Not everyone achieved every goal. But nearly everyone described growth: either in clarity, in confidence, or in the courage to pivot. Lesson for those about to walk/walking in these steps: Come with direction but hold it lightly. HBS will stretch, test, and sometimes redirect you. That’s not failure; that’s the intention subliminally trying to shape you into  “a leader who makes a difference in the world.” 2. Educational Transformation Nearly every EC mentioned the shock of RC year intensity. Many had “heard” it would be hard. Few truly understood what that meant until they were in the thick of six-hour academic days, endless case prep, and competing priorities. One EC who never aimed to be a Baker Scholar still found herself consumed by the pace. And yet, looking back, she recalls that year fondly, because shared intensity led to shared bonds that she’d cherish for life. There was also a surprising theme: several ECs confessed they don’t remember most RC cases. The case method is immersive and energizing, but ephemeral. What stuck more, they said, were moments of building and immersing themselves in the HBS community and what it has to offer: navigating ventures, launching student-led initiatives, organizing trips, and producing shows, among other things. One EC described a subtle tension: HBS can feel like you’re constantly consuming knowledge without necessarily producing something tangible. For her, leadership roles and extracurriculars provided that sense of contribution–of creating, not just analyzing. Another offered a “hot take”: RC year might actually be better than EC year. The deltas of learning are steeper. The sense of community is more cohesive. Everything feels new, expansive, electric. And yet, EC year brings freedom: the ability to choose classes aligned with interests, experiment with side projects, or double down on niche topics with world-class faculty. Several mentioned the unexpected accessibility of professors and guest speakers as one of HBS’s greatest differentiators. Key takeaway : Lean in and build–ventures, habits, relationships, anything else you wish. What you create in these couple years is likely to stay with you for life, becoming an inherent part of the human  you’re shaping into. 3. Personal Evolution If professional growth brought clarity and educational growth brought perspective, personal growth brought emotion. Almost every EC spoke about relationships. The section experience came up repeatedly: initially as an unknown, later as a cornerstone. One EC said she specifically hoped to feel deeply connected to her section and now feels comfortable interacting with anyone from it. Travel surfaced as a highlight: Colombia, FIELD, global treks, section retreats. For some, these experiences ranked among the best of their lives. Living within walking distance of friends. Long dinners. Spontaneous parties. Exposure to perspectives they had never encountered before. One EC marveled at meeting people whose careers once felt “imaginary”: TV producers at HBO, social impact leaders, founders across continents. The breadth of backgrounds reframed what felt possible, and acted as a reminder of the privilege and access the Harvard legacy and brand gives us. But personal growth wasn’t just about relationships, it was also about boundaries. More than one EC admitted they struggled to say no. HBS can feel like a two-year buffet: clubs, conferences, trips, side projects, recruiting, academics, social events. One peer described it as “a vacation, but not really.” The opportunity cost of saying yes to everything is depth, rest, and focus. Several wished they had learned to set boundaries earlier. Others found space for unexpected adulting milestones: learning to cook, doing meal prep, even learning to drive. In the controlled chaos of HBS, they built habits they hope to carry into more demanding post-grad lives. And as graduation approaches, many expressed a simple desire: to be more intentional with time. To spend evenings with friends they don’t see enough during busy weeks. To savor proximity before geography scatters them. What Would They Change? Interestingly, few expressed major regrets. Trade-offs are inevitable. Some prioritized academics; others leaned into social life or recruiting. Most acknowledged they would likely make similar trade-offs again: just perhaps with more awareness. And for those who didn’t achieve every professional goal? There was no bitterness–only reframing. A desire to focus on what went right in these final months. Looking Forward As they near graduation, ECs are focused on a few clear things: a) Hitting key milestones, whether for startups, jobs, or personal milestones; b) Being present for community moments; c) Building (portfolios, ventures, creative projects) while the safety net still exists, and d) Soaking in friendships before commencement turns proximity into plane tickets. And post-HBS? There’s excitement about stability–furniture, income, settling down. But also about momentum–nudging careers in new directions, creating value in the real world, scaling ambition. If there’s one throughline across all conversations, it’s this: HBS may not give you exactly what you expect, but it will likely give you more than you could’ve imagined; perhaps not always restricted to the categories you initially prioritized, but in more and better ways that will prove to be invaluable. Curtain Call As I close this (potentially final) Harbus piece, it’s hard to resist the temptation to write about where I stand in these areas. Ergo: you’ll know now, why the quote at the beginning of this piece. No matter how much my mentors/ friends told me to sit down and try to answer for myself, What do I want from the HBS experience? , my brain/heart couldn’t help but ask one question. Beyond the basics (e.g., finding a job and studying), what’s the worst that could happen if I didn’t have an answer to that question, and if I decided to take things as they came my way, personally and professionally, especially with SO MUCH being thrown at us? It was hard to convince myself to not do that. And this wasn’t a super conscious decision for someone who considers herself to be a meticulous planner–this was more a reaction to the supremely unexpected things that happened along my journey here. And, I wouldn’t hesitate to say, the experience has been nothing short of extraordinary. We often frame HBS as a transformation story. But transformation here rarely arrives in one dramatic moment. It comes in micro-shifts: a case that reframes how you think, a professor who invests in you, a late-night conversation that expands your worldview, a failure that redirects your path, a friend who becomes family. And so: For those nearing the end of this journey , take a moment to reflect and perhaps do something you wish you did but didn’t get a chance to. Great if you had goals and were able to achieve them. For those who didn’t achieve them/didn’t have any–good things come to those who wait, so, remember that the best is yet to come. For those who wish to/are about to traverse this journey, OR are about halfway through : whether you have clear goals or wish to take things as they come your way: remember that time flies, yet the moments last longer. In the ups and downs of this journey, remember to find your people, keep your purpose alive, and enjoy the ride–it’s truly going to be a fun one.    Palak Raheja (MBA ’26)  is originally from Lucknow, India. She graduated from Lady Shri Ram College, University of Delhi, with degrees in Statistics and Economics. Prior to HBS, she worked at Bain India, and in the Indian consumer and health-tech start-up ecosystem. In her free time, she can be found reading, running, or watching movies.

The Student Association’s strategy to make HBS events more inclusive, accessible, and impactful This year’s Student Association set out with an aim to make our events more inclusive and accessible to the student body, while also diversifying the types of events we provide. One of our priorities has been ensuring that our budget reflects those goals and directs spending in a way that maximizes value for students. Building Community in an Uncertain Campus Environment The Student Association (SA) exists separately from the university as an independent 501c3 nonprofit. The SA is responsible for organizing many of the events that make our community special, including Holidazzle, RC / EC Gala, the Harvard / Yale tailgate, Start Week and Section Olympics, and Bridges events. As a nonprofit, all of our revenue—dues, products, and event tickets—is reinvested directly back into these events.  One challenge this year is the broader financial uncertainty at Harvard University and Harvard Business School. This year, Student Activities & Support (SAS), a team in the school’s administration, has operated with reduced budgets for community events. As many students have noticed, several discretionary spending items have been eliminated, such as on-campus social events and the closing event for Weekend Sprints.  In response, the SA has worked to help fill that gap, providing funding for critical community programs such as Start Week, Section Olympics, and section t-shirts, which we feel play an important role in building shared experiences and section identity. We’ve also increased our budget for community events—for example, in the absence of a university-hosted event, the SA threw the inaugural SA Fall Fest, featuring a food truck and a live performance by the HBS band, the Fiduciaries. To help cover the cost of these events, we’ve brought on new sponsors such that the budget has not been re-allocated from other areas. Bringing Down Cost of Attendance for Flagship Events At the same time, we’ve been deliberately directing our budget toward reducing the cost burden of our marquee events (Holidazzle and RC / EC Galas). Research and student feedback around financial inclusivity consistently highlight one of the biggest pain points: the add-on costs associated with student events and parties.  This year, we are directing more funding than ever before into student events. Ticketed events are the single largest line item in the SA budget, representing 65% of annual budget. This directly subsidizes these events—for example, Holidazzle was subsidized over $50 per ticket to help keep tickets affordable. In addition to direct subsidies, we’ve implemented new mechanisms to keep prices down. Tickets were free for all fully aided students, an initiative that began last year through collaboration between the SA and the Student Senate. We also partnered with Juno, an HBS-founded startup, to provide $20 discounts to 250 students. Together, these efforts allowed us to keep the net ticket price far below inflation and broadly in line with last year’s pricing. We’re excited to carry this momentum forward into the RC and EC Galas, which will be among the biggest and most ambitious events the SA has ever delivered. We’re investing unprecedented levels of our budget into making these events great, while keeping them accessible to as many students as possible. Delivering More Value for Students Another common pain point raised by students has been the cost of printing. As a result, the SA piloted a $10 printing credit last year. This year, we are excited that this effort has been expanded to subsidize printing $40 per student. Importantly, this subsidy is now funded by the school rather than the SA, allowing us to reinvest $20,000 back into community events instead of printing costs. This year, our Products Office has also featured a wider range of merchandise, including the classic Patagonia fleeces, new Harvard-Yale merch, class t-shirts, Cotopaxi backpacks, scarves, and more to come this spring. All proceeds from the products office are reinvested back into supporting community events. Make sure to stop by the Products Office in Spangler to check out the merch while it is still on the shelves! In closing, we believe that our budget should reflect our values. This year, those values are centered on improving access, increasing inclusivity, and keeping student life affordable. We’re proud of what we’ve been able to deliver so far, and we welcome feedback and suggestions as we continue this work through the Spring semester. Ben Rubin (MBA ‘26)  is the Chief Financial Officer of the HBS Student Association, which is an independent 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Inside the Healthcare Club’s Second Annual Women's Health Summit There is a moment, somewhere around 8 a.m. on the day of an event you’ve spent months planning, when you realize you will not actually attend your own conference. You’ll be running logistics, fielding last-minute speaker questions, and directing people toward the bathroom, not sitting in the front row absorbing the conversations you curated. That was November 8 for Jenn Arnold (MBA ’26), Andrea Gonzalez Corleto (MBA ’26), Victoria Beecroft  (MBA ’26) and me. So when a senior venture capitalist with over 50 conferences behind her pulled us aside at the end of the day to say it was one of the best conferences she had ever attended, we didn't quite have the context to appreciate it. We had to take her word for it, and then read the notes attendees sent us (thanks Kayla and Ricky!). What follows is our best reconstruction of a day that, by all accounts, exceeded every expectation we had for the second annual HBS Healthcare Club’s Women’s Health Summit. The Day in Brief More than 350 attendees. Over twenty speakers. Four panels, two fireside chats, and one keynote spanning the full arc of building a women’s health company, from founding and go-to-market strategy to funding, medical devices, scaling, and a live pitch competition. Our definition of women's health was deliberately broad: health topics that are either specific to women or disproportionately impact them. That framing opened the door to conversations about fertility, menopause, diagnostics, wearables, cardiovascular care, and much more. “Progress Begins When You Hear the First No” Cindy Eckert opened the summit dressed in her signature head-to-toe pink. Eckert  is the co-founder and CEO of Sprout Pharmaceuticals, which brought Addyi, the first FDA-approved treatment for hypoactive sexual desire disorder in premenopausal women, to market after a prolonged regulatory battle. She sold her company for $1 billion, then regained control of it. Her portrait actually ran in the New York Times  the week after the summit. She made people emotional and energized before 9:30 a.m. on a Saturday, which is exactly the kind of start a women’s health conference deserves. Her message was defiant and practical: refuse the double standard and never mistake regulatory or market resistance for a verdict on your idea. Building the Company: GTM Strategy for Women’s Health Founders The first panel, “Digital Health GTM Winning Models” (yes, the name is very HBS; no, we are not sorry), was designed for the many students in the room who are considering founding in women’s health or joining early-stage startups. It brought together founders and operators working across the spectrum of digital women’s health, from hormone tracking and AI health companions to telehealth provider/pharmacy and enterprise medical devices: Aagya Mathur (CEO, Aavia), Amanda Ducach (CEO, Ema), Monica Cepak (CEO, Wisp), and Veronica Adamson (Head of Product & AI, Philips Healthcare) The panel covered the real tradeoffs between DTC, payer, employer, and hybrid go-to-market strategies and offered a few pieces of advice worth writing down. Among them: “What claims matter to the people you’re trying to sell to? Build for that.” And on paid marketing: use it to test messaging early, but don’t become dependent on it and invest in organic acquisition before you scale spend. Perhaps the most honest framing came around the question of how founders choose their GTM path: prioritize ruthlessly, pick the path with the highest chance of success, and be willing to revise. Maven, McKinsey, and the Value-Based Care Argument The fireside chat between Maven Clinic’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Neel Shah, and Anne Koffel, then a Partner at McKinsey & Company and now Chief Administrative Officer at CCRM Fertility, was one of the anchors of the day. Maven is often described as the first women’s health unicorn, and the conversation made it clear why: their insistence on value-based care over transactional fertility benefits forced them to build something genuinely differentiated. The example that stuck: Maven offers a conception coach at no additional cost which improves outcomes, and in a value-based care model, is exactly the kind of thing that justifies the contract. It’s also why Maven ended up serving rural Amazon employees, a population a traditional fertility clinic would never reach. As Neel put it, digital health is uniquely positioned to reach people where health actually happens: not in a clinic, but at home, work, and in the community. The broader framing: fertility sits at the intersection of every inequity in our society, including gender, racial, and generational inequities. Companies operating in this space that ignore that are leaving both impact and market on the table. Funding Women’s Health: Capital Is Moving, But Not Fast Enough The funding panel brought together investors and operators spanning early-stage venture, biotech innovation, and advocacy, moderated by Rachel Braun Scherl (Managing Partner, SPARK Solutions), a growth consultancy focused on women’s sexual and reproductive health, and featuring Anula Jayasuriya (Managing Director, Kidron Capital), Anastasia Budinskaya (Investor, NFX), Angelika Fretzen (COO, Wyss Institute), and Jodi Neuhauser (Founder & CEO, In Women’s Health). They addressed the question underlying most areas of women’s health: why has a market serving half the population been so consistently underfunded? Their answer: a combination of structural biases in who makes investment decisions, clinical trial designs that excluded women for decades, and reimbursement systems that were simply not built with women’s health in mind. The encouraging answer: that is starting to change. Pharma is paying attention—Eli Lilly has announced a women’s health investment, and Roche is moving into women’s diagnostics. The panel was direct about what founders need to do in the meantime: understand the actual mechanics of reimbursement, build coalitions, get to Washington and sit in on FDA hearings, and find the policy levers that are already moving at the state level. The first few major exits, with 10x and 20x returns, will change the risk calculus for the entire asset class. Medical Devices, Wearables, and the Evidence Problem The first afternoon panel brought together companies building at the frontier of hardware and diagnostics for women from smart rings and at-home hormone testing to thermal wearables and bone-strengthening devices: Lindsey Belknap (VP Product Marketing, Oura), Ioana Calcev (COO, Oova), Heather Ritchie (COO, Embr Labs), and Laura Yecies (CEO, Osteoboost), moderated by Geena Shah (Head of Business Operations, Evvy). They surfaced a tension running through much of women’s health hardware: how do you build a product category the healthcare system hasn’t learned to integrate yet? Embr Labs took seven years and two product generations to find product-market fit. The companies doing it well are building not just good hardware but the body of clinical evidence that gives physicians a reason to trust it. Oura’s continuous temperature tracking, long used for cycle insights, is now being explored as a signal for late-stage pregnancy changes, drawing interest from some obstetric providers. The broader point: wearables are a new layer of clinical infrastructure. Midi Health and the Longitudinal Care Model In conversation with Andrea Gonzalez Corleto (MBA ‘26), Joanna Strober, founder and CEO of Midi Health, offered one of the more instructive pivots of the day. Midi started as a primary care company focused on menopause and deliberately chose not to build a subscription model, the logic being that once a woman knows which prescription she needs, the relationship changes. Instead, Midi differentiated on longitudinal care with a consistent provider, plus multiple service lines, including supplements. The bet on continuity appears to be working: Midi now serves more than 25,000 women each week and soon after the summit became a unicorn with its $100M series D round. Her fundraising advice to female founders: treat every “no” as a “not right now” and learn to tell your story bigger and bigger until the right investor is in the room. Scaling in the Shadows: The Stigma Tax The final panel brought together founders and researchers working in some of the most stigmatized corners of women’s health with egg donation, period care, and healthcare for unhoused women: Professor Aziza Ahmed (Professor of Law, Boston University), Meela Imperato (Head of Marketing, Cofertility), Nadia Okamoto (co-founder, August), and Dr. Roseanna Means (Founder of Bridges to Moms, Senior Faculty at Brigham and Women’s Hospital). They took on something earlier sessions had circled: the cost of stigma, not just in business, but in health outcomes themselves. Nadia Okamoto scaled August to five million TikTok followers by posting images of used pads and talking openly about period blood, treating stigma itself as the market inefficiency. If you’re the brand willing to name the thing, you own the conversation. The same dynamic plays out in B2B: benefits administrators and procurement teams carry their own version of the discomfort, and founders have to make the clinical and economic case to people who may never have thought carefully about these topics.  Why It Matters Now These conversations took place against a broader cultural and political backdrop that makes the business of women’s health more consequential than ever. Renewed waves of masculinist rhetoric risk undermining some of the equity gains achieved in the early 21st century, and discouraging founders and investors from engaging with women-focused innovation precisely when the ecosystem needs scale and confidence. Ensuring women’s health remains visible as an economic growth driver and an innovation space is therefore a priority. Each investment, product, and policy win in this field strengthens the infrastructure that protects social and health progress itself. A Note to First-Year MBAs An interesting footnote from the day: a meaningful share of attendees were not HBS students at all. They came from across Boston for a student-led summit that competed with a major industry conference happening the same week and still drew a record crowd. We’re really excited about how the summit will grow in the coming years; in 2026, under the leadership of Anniqa Karmali (MBA ’27), Eliza Chomley (MBA ’27), and Courtney Sherbal (MBA ’27). Whether you want to attend, volunteer, or simply learn more, reach out to Eliza, Courtney, or Anniqa; they would love to hear from you. Coming Up: Fertility 101 and Egg Freezing Information Session On the topic of women’s health closer to home: the WSA and the HCC Women's Health SIG are co-organizing a Fertility 101 and Egg Freezing information event in April. The session will cover what students actually need to know (medically, financially, and practically) about fertility preservation. Details to follow via the WSA and HCC Women’s Health SIG channels. Thank You This summit would not have happened without the exceptional groundwork of Christina Vosbikian (MBA ’25) and Ricky Cordoba (MBA ’25), who organized the inaugural HCC Women's Health Summit last year, and the hard work of our volunteers this year Emily Price (MBA ’26), Sylvie Stoloff (MBA ’26), and Robin Vergouwen (MPH ’26). Thank you to every speaker who gave their time, and to the 350+ people who showed up. And thank you to our sponsors J.P. Morgan, Cooley, the HBS Healthcare Initiative, Pillar VC, and In Women’s Health, whose support made this event possible. Jane Douat (MBA ’26) is originally from Paris, France. She graduated from Télécom Paris with a degree in computer science engineering. Prior to HBS, Jane was the co-founder and CTO of Omena, a women’s health startup building a mobile app for women going through menopause.

Michelle Yu (MBA ‘26) on luck, leverage, and the limits of extreme wealth I could have been a maid scrubbing hotel conference rooms after another champagne-soaked boardroom bash. Or the executive who proposed the toast. I could have been a waitress balancing plates at an oft-patronized corner bistro. Or the banker negotiating its impending acquisition. The reason I am not any of these people begins with a hinge: twenty-five years ago, a woman in China left me outside a building, and another woman in New Jersey picked me up. Adoption was the first axis on which my entire life would spin. In another iteration—one in which I was never abandoned, or was adopted by a family without established means, or was raised in a different country—the trajectory bends elsewhere. My education, my network, my financial literacy, even the periphery of what I can imagine is possible: all of it flows downstream from that single, unchosen event. Long before I could prove anything about myself, the baseline from which I would compete had already been raised. I have spent years wrestling with belonging and worth—with the invisible arithmetic of what it means to “deserve” love and opportunity. But recently, a more disquieting question has taken root: if I could have been someone entirely different through no fault or merit of my own, what does that mean for the stories we tell ourselves about wealth? The media loves the mythology of the self-made billionaire: the visionary who saw what others could not, the genius who outworked the room, the founder who “deserved” every zero. But the critique of modern capitalism posits a darker reality: that billionaires are less the inevitable outcome of pure talent and more the product of systems engineered to funnel gains to the top. Between 2010 and 2018, America’s 400 wealthiest families paid an average federal income tax rate of just 8.2% , lower than that of any middle-class household. As of 2025, Forbes  counts more than 3,000 billionaires globally, worth a combined $16.1 trillion. Meanwhile, research  from the National Institute on Retirement Security shows that the average American worker has less than $1,000 saved for retirement. We would like to believe that this concentration of wealth is the natural result of meritocracy. That if someone builds a company to a billion-dollar valuation, it must reflect extraordinary ability. But in Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney argues that markets reward scarcity, spectacle, leverage, and scalability—proxies utterly indifferent to moral worth or social necessity. An NBA player can make millions of dollars a year, while a sanitation worker earns a fraction of that, yet one could argue that the latter’s labor of keeping cities habitable is at least as essential to societal function as professional sports. Compensation, Carney suggests, tracks what markets happen to reward rather than any intrinsic contribution to collective wellbeing. When we conflate price for value, we risk building a society that knows the cost of everything and the worth of very little. Success is partly talent. It is partly discipline. But it is also geography, timing, capital access, early education, family structure, regulatory environments, and sheer accident—the imperceptible inheritances that predate effort. If I had grown up in a rural village in China without access to advanced schooling, would I have been any less intelligent? Less capable? Or simply less positioned? The Compounding Effect of Starting Conditions At HBS, we are trained to think in terms of leverage and compounding returns. Capital compounds. Networks compound. Brands compound. But so do starting conditions. Many of us are about to step into careers that confer disproportionate leverage relative to the average worker, managing capital that exceeds the lifetime earnings of entire communities and advising companies whose market capitalizations eclipse the GDP of small nations. If we accept that luck and structure guide outcomes, then extreme wealth cannot be interpreted solely as a referendum on virtue. Billionaires are often framed as proof of individual excellence, yet their fortunes also reveal a market in which gains scale infinitely for some while others remain bounded by hourly wages. At that degree of magnitude, effort becomes beside the point. What demands scrutiny is whether any system should permit the accumulation of more wealth than one person could reasonably spend in several lifetimes. When accumulation outpaces necessity, wealth abandons the domain of security or comfort and becomes stored power used to influence trade, politics, narratives, and public goods. Defenders of billionaires argue that net worth is illiquid. That founders create jobs, drive innovation, and take risks that others will not. I do not disagree. Innovation, incentives, and growth all matter. But critics counter that such wealth is routinely built on the labor of thousands, on systems that underprice externalities like environmental damage and worker precarity, on regulatory arbitrage that privatizes gains while socializing losses. And then there is philanthropy, which obscures the story further. When a billionaire donates $5 million, headlines call it generous. However, for someone worth a billion dollars, that donation constitutes 0.5% of their net worth, which is the equivalent of a middle-class donor giving away a few hundred dollars. What appears generous in isolation now looks modest in proportion. More crucially, if we believe that every human life holds equal inherent worth, then we must acknowledge the incongruity of a world in which some hold resources that could eliminate hunger, erase medical debt, or fund universal education but choose not to deploy them to such effect. Is that choice defensible? Or does the very existence of such concentrated wealth signal a moral failure of distribution? The Lives We Might Have Lived I sometimes imagine the life I would have had if I were never adopted. Perhaps I would have grown up in an orphanage, aging out at 18 years old with limited support. Perhaps I would have worked in a factory, assembling products I could never afford, or as domestic help in a city apartment, upholding someone else’s version of success. Perhaps I would have found joy in a small circle of modest intimacies, never encountering the vocabulary of capital or the argot of high finance. If that had been the case, would my life have been any less worthy? Less meaningful? Less impactful? If worth is intrinsic rather than market-determined, then the answer must be no. And yet, our economic system assigns radically different monetary values to different roles. We internalize those signals, equating high income with high contribution and treating net worth as a testament to significance. But my own biography disrupts that equation. The difference between the life I live now and the one I might have lived is not evidence of superior character but of contingency. And if we are honest about contingency—about how thin the line is between the maid and the executive, the waitress and the dealmaker—then extreme inequality becomes harder to justify as simply the spoils of merit. What We Owe Each Other When I was a child, I believed that to be loved, I had to resemble the family that chose me. It took years to understand that real love is unconditional and incommensurate with performance. Maybe human dignity should be treated the same way. Maybe those who hold vastly more than they could ever need should consider what abundance says about how much they believe everyone else’s life is worth. There is no alternate timeline in which I am the same person, but there are many timelines in which I never had the chance. And if that is true for me, then it is true for countless others—equally capable, equally intelligent, equally human—whose hinges swung differently. Once you see how much of your own life rests on a hinge you did not install, calling extreme wealth purely “deserved” becomes an act of willful blindness. What we are really refusing to see is whether we can actually forge a society that honors the equal worth of all lives while countenancing such profound asymmetry in the resources allocated to sustain them. Because a culture that preaches equal worth and practices unworthy inequality has not yet decided what it actually believes. And, in the end, what we tolerate is what we have chosen. Michelle Yu (MBA '26) is originally from Cresskill, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Film and Media Studies and worked for CNBC, NBC News, and CNN prior to HBS, along with projects for HBO, Showtime, Oxygen, and Spectrum. Outside of work, she is a 2x marathon runner, American Songwriting Awards winner, and filmmaker whose work has screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and AMC's Empire Theaters in Times Square.

Folu Ogunyeye (MBA ’27) on apathy and abstraction in the business of social change work When I handed in my notice at my job before coming to HBS, I braced myself for a culture shock. Having spent the majority of my career in the social impact sector, I anticipated the case method to be a grueling exercise in defending my ideals against those faithful to the unrelenting bottom line. Yet I have been pleasantly surprised to find a sizable community of students who have engaged with or hope to support the non-profit world in some capacity, whether as a volunteer, as a board member, or through pro bono work. The institution even provides a robust scaffolding for this work: I have found myself feeling at home within the programming of the HBS Social Enterprise Initiative, as well as in the Social Enterprise and Impact Investing student clubs. What has surprised me the most about coming to HBS after working in the non-profit sector is how “social impact” is conceptualized, especially in the ways that non-profit organizations are represented in the cases taught during the RC year. Without getting too bogged down in the specifics, I have noticed that there is a tendency for viewpoints on the feasibility of social change work to fall into two main camps: the Skeptics  and the Technocrats .  The Skeptics, on one hand, treat social and environmental impact as a fringe externality, i.e., a “nice-to-have” variable that is too mathematically “fuzzy” to be factored into the “real work” of discounted free cash flow analyses. “Measuring impact is hard, so why do it?” — A Skeptic, probably.  Yet I have noticed that those of us at HBS who oppose the Skeptics (myself included) tend to fall prey to another pitfall by swinging to the other extreme. The Technocrats respond to this marginalization by over-engineering impact into a sophisticated “product,” layering on convoluted frameworks and shiny studies to prove their work is “rigorous” enough for elite spaces. In doing so, they force fit urgent human crises through the narrow, impersonal needle of data points, prioritizing intellectual sophistication over the uncomfortable, messy work of holding power accountable. “The work of generating positive social and environmental impact is so complex that you can do it without working closely with those most impacted by your work.”  — A Technocrat, secretly. I find myself falling under the Technocrat camp more often than I would like, such as using sector-specific jargon when it would be more helpful to speak in accessible terms. It is nice to feel like an expert, but should this take priority over actually being effective at driving impact? Technocrats can too easily fall into the trap of wanting to prove to the Skeptics that it is possible to “do well by doing good.” In Business School Land, we speak of the “double bottom line” and the ever-growing alphabet soup of interventions involving ESG, SROI, and (the virtually defunct) DEI that deliver market-rate returns through carefully crafted portfolios and flashy pitch decks. I think both camps are exposed to the same risk of viewing the social and environmental consequences of business as abstract ideas that are only considered during impassioned debates in Aldrich classrooms. I have been trying to put my finger on how exactly to describe my uneasiness with this distancing of impact from the many lives impacted by business and policy decisions and have settled on the term impact neutering . Impact neutering describes the sterilization of the meaning of impact. Through this process, “impact” becomes an abstraction at best and a self-serving, virtue signalling exercise at worst (see “ impact washing ” for more on the latter). This idea builds on existing concepts that critique the professionalization of social impact and international development work like the “non-profit industrial complex,” as outlined by INCITE! or, more recently, “MarketWorld,” as coined by Anand Giridharadas in his seminal work, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. At the core of these concepts is the crucial question of whether the purpose of social impact initiatives should be to a) provide band-aid solutions that leave the current power dynamics untouched, or b) question and overhaul the systematic root causes of symptomatic issues. Impact neutering is a conceptual side-effect of a deeper trend that has material consequences: the concentration of wealth and power into fewer hands as the rest of the world becomes increasingly vulnerable to the “polycrisis” of climate emergencies, economic instability, and uncertainty in the face of AI. The role of those working in social impact becomes increasingly opaque when our shared understanding of what impact even means becomes murkier and grows more disconnected from the harsh realities that ordinary people have to deal with on a daily basis.  Beyond Impact Neutering: The Case for Reckoning and Accountability No one really wants to have an honest conversation about the way their work is complicit in upholding structures of oppression. But given the direction that society is heading, when will we have these conversations? Will the right time ever come, or will we be stuck in an everlasting call-and-response to the tune of “Tomorrow” from Annie ? I have noticed that in Business School Land, the closest we ever really come to connecting the dots between our individual actions and material consequences is in FRC and LCA, where we examine cautionary tales of HBS alumni who once sat in our very seats but now find themselves serving time for fraud or insider trading. Unfortunately, it feels as though those classes deliver the biggest takeaways to be, “it’s okay to harm others in the name of shareholder value, just as long as you don’t break the law while doing it.” We spend time debating whether their illegal misgivings were “a victimless crime” without leaving much space to question why business leaders are granted a “moral pass” for systemic harm beyond the remit of the courtroom. This is impact neutering in its full glory, as we fail to connect the dots between action and consequences for wider society and instead are only ever concerned with immoral actions that result in jail time for the individual perpetrator. There have been attempts in the HBS community at reconciling this discrepancy. In 2009, a group of HBS students created the “ MBA Oath ” in the wake of the global financial crisis. It was a voluntary pledge for graduating students to “create value responsibly and ethically” and recognize that their decisions have “consequences for the well-being of individuals inside and outside [this] enterprise.” It was born out of a genuine desire to restore the reputation of the MBA degree and promise that we would never again be the “villains” of a 2008-style collapse. However, over 15 years later, the Oath feels more like a surface-level gesture than a structural solution. It is a private, voluntary act of virtue that relies entirely on an individual’s personal conscience. The problem is that a leader’s conscience is rarely a match for the crushing incentives of shareholder primacy. An oath without an accountability mechanism is just another form of impact neutering, i.e., a moral shield that allows us to feel virtuous without ever actually surrendering power. To move beyond the performance of good intent, we must transition from individual morality to systemic architecture. This work should not be left just to our friends at the Kennedy School or the Law School. If we pride ourselves on being “disruptors” capable of bringing audacious ideas to market, then the ultimate frontier of innovation is not a new product, but rather the fundamental redesign of the firm itself to serve more than just the capital funding it. We are seeing a growing movement toward the “ownership economy” in the form of alternative ownership structures like employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), community land trusts (CLTs), and multi-stakeholder cooperatives. Unlike the voluntary pledges of the past, these models embed accountability into the modus operandi, ensuring those most impacted by a business’ decisions possess the formal power and financial stake to guide its direction. While this may not solve the world’s greatest ills in one fell swoop, it sure seems like a step in the right direction. We cannot continue to treat the symptoms of our system while ignoring the ways we benefit from the disease. To be a leader is not to find a clever way to “do good” on the sidelines; rather, it is to take responsibility for the baseline of harm baked into our very models. If “impact” is to mean anything at all, it must stop being something we perform for one another and start being the standard to which we allow ourselves to be held on a systematic level. Folu Ogunyeye (MBA ‘27)  grew up in Milton Keynes in the UK. She graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in Human, Social and Political Sciences. Prior to HBS, Folu worked in HR at BlackRock in Atlanta and in social impact consulting between New York and London. Beyond work, Folu loves to write, explore art galleries or catch a live jazz gig.

The military and Harvard shaped my family. Severing that bond weakens us all I exist because the Army and Harvard once made room for each other. My father came to this university through the Army more than 35 years ago as part of his training to become a Foreign Area Officer, earning a master’s in East Asian Studies. Along the way, he met my mother, who was a classmate in a Korean history class.  My father’s path to Harvard wasn’t a straight one. The son of Korean immigrants who grew up relatively poor in the Bronx during the 70s, he worked his way into the University of Pennsylvania. To pay for school, he joined Army ROTC and fell in love with the military. The Army gave him structure he never had, as well as a profound sense of duty, purpose and integrity. Throughout his career, the Army kept investing in his education and eventually he was able to attend Harvard. There, he received a different kind of training, time to read deeply, argue carefully, and learn a region well enough to serve there with humility. He also carried the costs of service, surviving the attack on the Pentagon on September 11. Afterwards, he again returned to Harvard through the military, where I joined him alone for two years, old enough to absorb that a uniform and books can belong in the same life. Now, as I approach graduation from Harvard Business School, the story has a full-circle symmetry that’s hard to ignore. I followed in my father’s footsteps and served in the military for eight years. For my family, the Army and Harvard were never competing identities. Together, they made it possible for the son of immigrants to become a Colonel in the United States Army and provide a better life for his family. A Decision to Separate On February 6, 2026, Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the Pentagon will end all military training, fellowships, and certificate programs with Harvard beginning in the 2026-27 academic year. Secretary Hegseth framed the move as a response to Harvard’s campus climate and priorities, arguing that the partnership no longer serves the military’s core needs. Whether one agrees with his characterization or not, the decision treats separation as a corrective pull back from elite academia to protect the force’s culture and mission. Harvard, like any powerful institution, does not deserve blind trust. In recent years, the University has too often been slow to confront antisemitism, intolerant of viewpoint diversity, and overly comfortable with moral posturing. Despite this, this decision is also, in my view, mistaken.  I’m firmly on the side that this is a profound loss for the country. This isn’t just about partisan divides; it’s institutional. Civil-military trust isn’t sustained by speeches or platitudes. It’s built the boring way, through repeated contact, shared spaces, and enough familiarity that disagreement doesn’t turn into contempt. I think this decision makes the country worse off in two meaningful ways. The Cost of Distance First, it widens a civil-military divide that is already becoming structural. The United States’ all-volunteer force solved real problems after Vietnam, but it also made it easier for much of the country to live at a polite distance from the military. Over time, service has concentrated in tighter clusters of the population. A widely cited snapshot from Pentagon recruiting data found that 80% of recent recruits had a close relative who served, and more than 25% had a parent who served.  Meanwhile, the veteran share of the adult population has declined, Pew reports more than 18 million living U.S. veterans, about 6% of American adults.  In plain terms, fewer civilians have lived experience with the military, while the nation increasingly draws from a narrowing slice of the country to serve. Geography reinforces this gap. Studies have noted Pentagon concerns that recruiting strength in the South and Southwest, driven in part by the concentration of installations and retirees, could leave the all-volunteer force more regionally isolated over time.  When the burdens of service become concentrated, whether by family networks, geography, or social circles, the rest of the country understands the associated costs less clearly. That is where universities matter, not as pure arbiters of patriotism, but as rare places where these worlds can meaningfully interact. Many of my classmates had never really known, or even talked to, a service member or veteran before arriving here. That’s not a moral failing but a civic fact. And in the absence of everyday contact, people turn into symbols and stereotypes. The service member is seen as hero or villain, while the students are portrayed as naïve or radical. Meaningful contact cuts through caricature but separation hardens it. Harvard, for all its internal disagreements, has historically been one of those bridges. During World War II, Harvard Business School trained officers on campus and the Navy Supply Corps School during the war. Harvard College’s Army ROTC was established on campus in 1916, and was one of the six original Navy ROTC partner institutions in 1926. Today, over 100 Harvard students participate in ROTC, committing themselves to serving the country after graduation. These ties were and are a democratic asset precisely because they make the relationship personal. Both Harvard and the military benefited as partners at a time of national and global crisis. That history doesn’t require blind endorsement of everything the military does. It’s simply evidence that our institutions once understood something we are currently at risk of forgetting—that you can engage in serious debate and still build durable channels between those who fight and those who govern. Innovation is a National Imperative Second, it harms U.S. innovation at a moment when innovation is a strategic necessity. Top universities are clusters of human capital, research, and early-stage financing. Even students who never wear a uniform can still be deeply patriotic, service-minded, and eager to work on difficult problems at the intersection of technology and national security. At Harvard, that ecosystem is thriving. The annual Technology and National Security Conference, run by Harvard and MIT students, brings builders, operators, investors, government leaders, and academics into the same room to talk about real defense and security challenges.  Programs like the Q Lab at the Harvard Kennedy School put innovators and decision makers invested in national security in the same room. Shield AI, founded by an HBS veteran, is one of the most successful and innovative defense companies of the last decade.  You don’t have to believe every defense tech startup is good to see the strategic point. Modern deterrence and battlefield effectiveness increasingly depend on software, autonomy, sensing, and rapid iteration. If the Pentagon walls itself off from major centers of research and talent on ideological grounds, it doesn’t just punish Harvard. It limits its own access to the ecosystem that can produce world-class innovation at a time when the United States can least afford self-inflicted constraints. The reverse is also true. If elite academic institutions treat the military as a stereotype, they will produce graduates less fluent in implementation, tradeoffs, and the cost of policy. Neither side benefits, and most importantly, the country doesn’t. Guardrails, not Barriers A serious democracy should debate the use of force. It should ask hard questions about strategy, ethics, civilian harm, procurement waste, secrecy, and civil liberties. But severing contact is not the same thing as accountability. We can demand standards and guardrails while keeping open the channels that make democratic control real. Channels where civilians and service members learn each other’s language and perspective, and where disagreement doesn’t metastasize into mutual contempt. The most damaging civil-military gaps don’t appear overnight; they accumulate. They manifest slowly as mistrust, policy failure, and a politics that treats both the armed forces and civilian institutions as either icons or enemies, but never as fellow citizens. My father’s story is only one example of what can be built when those channels stay open. We should be more hopeful, and more determined, about reopening them. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone. Isaac Hendrik Kim (MBA ‘26) grew up as an Army brat. He graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 2016 with a degree in Foreign Area Studies. Prior to HBS, he served as an Army Aviation Officer and UH-60 Black Hawk pilot. He enjoys spending his free time with his wife Kristina and their beagle, Goofy.

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.

Jessie Yang reflects on building, running, and ultimately shutting down her meal service startup On Sundays, while most of her classmates wrapped up case prep or just took a breather from the week, Jessie Yang (MBA ’26) was in the kitchen. For 10 to 12 hours at a time, she cooked, portioned, and packed dozens of homestyle Chinese meal boxes. Alongside a few volunteers, Yang prepped proteins, washed and chopped vegetables, labeled containers, and rented a Zipcar to deliver meals across Boston. Jade Kitchen, the healthy Chinese meal service she built while juggling a full-time MBA at Harvard Business School, depended on that demanding work. What started as a personal craving for nourishing, homecooked food grew into a business with loyal customers and real revenue. For Yang, turning Jade Kitchen into a fully operational company meant learning how to build it, operate it day-to-day, and ultimately decide when it no longer made sense to continue.  What’s for Dinner? Yang came to business school hoping to pursue entrepreneurship after spending the first five years of her career working in big tech. Seeking more autonomy than large organizations allowed, she decided to use her two years to test an idea of her own.  The idea for Jade Kitchen came from a familiar problem. While in corporate, Yang often found herself too tired to cook after the workday, craving Asian food that was both healthy and satisfying.  “It just felt like it was such a barrier in my life that I wanted to solve it for myself,” she said. “I wanted something that felt like my mom’s cooking. My parents cooked every meal from scratch every night. The problem is, if you’re one person, ordering family-style takeout doesn’t work—you spend $60 or $70 and eat the same food for days. I wanted that light, home-cooked taste in a single-serve format.” Cooking for Classmates Yang started by trying to understand whether others shared the same frustration. In the fall of 2025, she sent out a survey to classmates and followed up with informal recipe-tasting nights based out of the McCulloch dorm kitchen. Dozens of classmates responded and showed up, drawn in part by the promise of free food.  The first night was chaotic. Yang had never cooked at scale before, and coordinating timing, portions, and logistics was harder than expected. But during the second night, someone asked a simple question that changed everything: “Could I pay you for this?” The meals themselves were inspired by her upbringing. “A lot of the early boxes were my favorite dishes from my parents,” Yang said. “My mom’s chicken and celery stir-fry with wood ear, and my dad’s hong shao ribs with potatoes.” From there, Yang built a customer list from those original set of classmates, delivering meals around campus and refining recipes week by week.  Beyond the Dorm Kitchen  As interest grew, it quickly became clear that cooking out of the McCulloch dorm kitchen was not sustainable. To test whether demand for her meal service existed outside the HBS bubble, she began posting about Jade Kitchen on TikTok and Instagram over winter break. To her surprise, Yang’s first video went viral, reaching more than 500,000 people within days and drawing the attention of people across the country who said they loved the concept and wished it were available near them. With that validation, Yang began to think more seriously about what Jade Kitchen could become. She envisioned building a healthy Asian alternative to mainstream meal delivery companies like Factor. Turning that vision into reality meant moving out of the dorm kitchen and formalizing operations. By the summer of 2025, she began experimenting with different production setups, first partnering with a local restaurant and later renting time in a commercial kitchen.  That shift quickly changed the nature of the work, requiring Yang to coordinate schedules, source more ingredients, and manage people and production. While Jade Kitchen attracted a small handful of volunteers, Yang was deeply involved in every step. She developed recipes, cooked most of the dishes herself, delivered meals, and made sure there was enough food to meet each week’s orders.  Over the course of 14 weeks, Jade Kitchen generated roughly $8,000 in revenue and served over 500 meals to more than 80 customers. About half reordered, and some ordered every single week, in a few cases buying 40 boxes over time. “It blew my mind that I created something, turned an idea into reality, and people were paying for it and coming back,” said Yang. “It felt super fulfilling.” Making It Work By most measures, Jade Kitchen was working. Customers were returning, revenue was growing, and interest continued to build. But running the business week after week raised a different question for Yang: whether she could—or wanted to—keep going. She found herself questioning what it would mean to commit to years of operating a meal delivery business, particularly in an industry defined by rising labor costs, price-sensitive customers, and a high level of physical involvement. “The barrier to continuing wasn’t lack of customers or profitability,” said Yang. “It was me. I physically could not do this type of business. I realized I might not be the right person to run this business long term.” What made the question harder was the sense of responsibility that came with customer traction. By this time, Yang had built a customer list of more than 670 customers in Boston who were notified every time a new menu dropped. Many of her customers were households who had come to rely on Jade Kitchen’s meal service as part of their weekly routine.  “I built very personal relationships with our most loyal customers,” Yang said. “I felt so guilty in the fall thinking, should I shut this down? I felt like I made a promise to my customers.” At the same time, the reality was that running Jade Kitchen was taking a toll on Yang. “Working on this for a year made me fall out of love with cooking,” Yang admitted. “Being in food service is very manually intensive.” Closing Jade Kitchen Yang completed her last run and shut down operations in February. Looking back, Jade Kitchen did exactly what she needed it to do. It turned an idea into a business, but it also helped her understand the kind of work she did and did not want to commit to in the long term. “I needed to prove to myself that I could do it—that I could take something I was passionate about and see it all the way through,” said Yang. At the same time, the experience reshaped how she thinks about entrepreneurship. “Being a founder was amazing, but it also came with a constant mental load,” she said. “The biggest learning for me is that passion alone may not be enough. You really have to think about how much you’re willing to sacrifice—financially, emotionally, and personally. That’s a very personal decision.” For Yang, closing Jade Kitchen was not about failure, but about finishing something honestly and with a clearer understanding of herself, the work, and what she wants to build next. Katerina Gan (MBA ’27)  is originally from Riverside, California. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Economics. Prior to HBS, she worked at Linden Capital Partners, a healthcare private equity firm based in Chicago.