Student Profile: Oliver Hahl '08

Summer internship: strategy, Rohm and Haas Specialty Materials

I served a mission for my church in Korea, and it got me really interested in the idea of living in other countries. After college I went to work for ABB, a large engineering conglomerate based in Switzerland that has a global rotational program. Over two years, I worked in Pinetops, North Carolina; at ABB Headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland; and in São Paulo, Brazil.
I was doing finance but I wanted to get more into general management. I liked dealing with people and managing people and working in a team more than journal entries and capital budgeting decisions. Finance was a good background, but a lot of times I felt I was shut out of the marketing discussion or the general organizational discussion because I didn't have that background. So I decided to go back to school. One of the reasons I choose Yale SOM was the new curriculum. It really spoke to that concern, of sitting in the room with the operations person and general manager and being only allowed to talk about finance, when I felt like I could contribute to other things.

If you ask me what my favorite class is, the answer really depends on which class I had last. This morning I had Competitive Strategy with Fiona Scott Morton, and that's just been fantastic. She does such a good job of framing these issues in a more rigorous way. It’s one thing to ask, "Why is this company doing well?" and list off four or five facts about what they're good at. But she takes a step back and looks at it using an economic perspective to see why, exactly, things played out the way they did.

In the core curriculum, I really liked both the Customer and Competitor classes, and the Employee class was really good. The Integrated Leadership Perspective is the best, because you get all the perspectives combined. This week's classes for ILP were about the personality of leaders, and how your personality affects the way you lead. The class yesterday included Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech — what they call "Big L" leadership, leading large-scale societal change.

For the International Experience, I went to South Africa and Tanzania. It was a well-rounded trip — we looked at large nonprofits; small, social-venture organizations; huge bank corporations; smaller multinationals that have a satellite office in Johannesburg. It was only 10 days, but I feel like I can talk about business in South Africa or Tanzania as knowledgeably as I can talk about business in Brazil, where I lived and worked for eight months.

Being at SOM has definitely propelled me toward my original goals, but it's also changed me. I was an athlete as an undergrad, so I didn't have as much time to devote to studies. Here I’ve focused on getting as much out of the class work as I can. As a result studying about management is really exciting to me. Every day I look forward to reading the cases and doing the readings for class.

Interviewed April 26, 2007.