Student Profile: Search For Impact

Morgan Hall ’10
Program Manager, Net Impact
Summer Internship: Boston Consulting Group

Before coming to SOM, I was a public school teacher in New York City. I arrived as Mayor Bloomberg was trying to reform city schools and got to be a founding teacher at a small school. We did a lot right there, but I realized that while the best teachers focus almost exclusively on their students, I was thinking more about the school and about how it fit into the school system and how the system fit into the city.

An MBA is a really powerful tool to be an agent for change, so it seemed natural to go to business school. A top executive at an educational organization suggested Yale, and when I visited, I felt like I’d fit right in.

I’ve always been determined to embrace any great opportunity that arises. I didn’t know a lot about consulting when I arrived at SOM, but the more I learned about it, the more I was intrigued. I liked the idea of looking at a company as a whole and then picking out key information and gathering relevant data to devise a strategy for moving forward.

I came to business school to learn how businesses work and to learn how people work in different industries. Even in going through the case practice and the case interviews for consulting internships, I was able to do that. I had to put myself in the mindset of CEOs and think about what sort of data they are looking at, how to collect it, and how to make decisions based on limited information.

I’ll be at BCG in New York this summer. I think that it will teach me the concrete skills that will help me to be more valuable whether working in consulting or in other sectors. I know that after SOM I’ll be able to approach a system, diagnose its problems, and find ways to fix them. The learning curve at SOM has been really steep for me. That’s a good thing. I look at the world differently now.

Interviewed on April 23, 2009.