Student Profile: Organizational Change

Elizabeth Dunning '07
Summer internship: Uncommon Schools
Post-MBA position: Booz Allen Hamilton

I spent the six years between college and Yale SOM in the nonprofit sector in Washington, D.C. First I worked for a federal independent agency called Neighborhood Reinvestment, and then I spent three years at a youth services organization called Higher Achievement, ending up as director of program operations.

Coming to Yale SOM was fascinating. It was a cold shower, at the beginning, to be in a room with people that had such incredibly different perspectives and experience. When you're used to working with people who have largely had work experience like you, who are evaluating things in a way that's very similar to you, that's a little jarring.

But in a wonderful way, it required that I sharpen up and think about things in a different way, to force myself to wear different lenses. I knew if I was going to speak up and offer my opinion in class, I really needed to understand what was driving that opinion. It really required me to unpack my own assumptions.

One of my favorite classes was Sharon Oster’s Strategic Management of Nonprofits. What I liked the most about it — and this has been true every time we've done a nonprofit-related case in any of the classes I've taken —is that the thinking is not soft. In my own work, it drove me nuts when I came across employees who wake up every day and say "I'm a good person and I'm working for a good organization" and that's the extent of how they’re evaluating themselves and their work. That doesn't do the people you're serving any good. If you really care about the mission you're working on, then you need to evaluate it left, right, and sideways and make sure that you're operating effectively and efficiently and learning and getting better.

I'm going to work for Booz Allen after graduation, which surprised me more than anybody else. I’ll be doing organizational change consulting. The first year will be private sector, but once I get all my FBI clearance, I will be doing consulting for national security agencies in Washington, D.C. It's wholly different from anything that I expected that I would be doing when I started here, and it's wholly different from anything I've done before.

There are a lot of people in my class that I'm just excited to see what they do. I know what their next jobs are, but what is going to be really interesting is discovering what their life's work is. That's what seems really promising. And that's what I'm really excited to hear about, as we all leave here and march out into the world.

Interviewed April 26, 2007.