Author: Kim Girard

AccelerateHer plans immersive startup weekends at Haas

| by Kim Girard
Left to right: Christine Kim, Tanya Krishan, Julia Liu, Rajavi Mishra, Labanya Mukhopadhyay, Alissa Hsueh & Jiyoo Jeong.
Left to right: AccelerateHer board members: Christine Kim, Tanya Krishan, Julia Liu, Rajavi Mishra, Labanya Mukhopadhyay, Alissa Hsueh & Jiyoo Jeong

As a kid, Saumya Goyal, BS 21, was already an aspiring entrepreneur, sketching drawings of mechanical wings that she planned to build for flying.

Saumya Goyal
Saumya Goya, BS 21, is chief advisor to AccelerateHer.

Now a Haas junior, Goyal is still enthusiastic about making things, as chief advisor to AccelerateHer at UC Berkeley, a campus club that promotes entrepreneurship for women and will be hosting the first of two new AccelerateHer Startup Weekends next month. Goyal will be among the AccelerateHer team welcoming UC Berkeley students who are ready to dive deep into new startup ideas on Nov. 9-10 and 16-17.  Students can apply here.

“This club has been through a lot of growth and now we’re focused on these weekends,” said Goyal, who interned this past summer at Palo Alto-based startup TripActions and is working on her own social startup that will help women in India’s developing villages.

Focus on collaboration

The weekends are funded through a three-year grant from Blackstone LaunchPad, a program created by the Blackstone Charitable Foundation and the Techstars network to equip students with more tools and resources for exploring entrepreneurship. (Earlier this month, Blackstone announced a $5 million expansion of  the LaunchPad program, allotting $500,000 to each University of California campus).

Rajavi Mishra, president of AccelerateHer
Rajavi Mishra, president of AccelerateHer

Rajavi Mishra, president of AccelerateHer, said the weekends will provide an opportunity for more team collaboration, something that she has sometimes found challenging at hackathons, where females were underrepresented and the focus was on coding.

“We wanted to host this because at a lot of the hackathons you have to know how to code and a lot of my friends don’t know how to code, so they won’t apply,” said Mishra, a computer science major who is applying to Haas. “This is a platform for both people who know how to code and have other skills so that they can collaborate and build a product over the weekend.”

Dipping a toe in the water

The weekends also provide an immersive opportunity to students who don’t have time to commit to a semester’s long course in entrepreneurship or a longer startup boot camp.

Over each weekend, the teams will explore their ideas, discover customers, build prototypes, and validate the business opportunity. The events, to be held in both Chou Hall and Cheit Hall, culminate with teams pitching their startups.

All teams will have at least three and a maximum of five members, and two of the team members must identify as female. Participants need only arrive with an idea, said Rhonda Shrader, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program. Anyone who arrives without a team will be matched with other students, she said. The events offer 10 interactive startup workshops, mentorship from top startup founders, networking mixers, and startup toolkits.

Shrader said the weekends are a way to bring more women into entrepreneurship, particularly those who shy away from hackathons and coding.

“This is a way for them to dip their toe in the water,” she said. “If we want more female founders this is how we’ve got to do it.”

Mishra, who grew up in Delhi, India, a fourth-generation entrepreneur, started her startup journey in grade school, building websites for friends and small businesses.

By ninth grade, she created a social enterprise called Zariya, that developed workshops and programs aimed at helping abused children in New Delhi. But she said that there wasn’t a lot of support for startups in her area. “That’s why I wanted to come to Berkeley and when I came here I realized the amount of support we have,” she said. “I cannot be more thankful.”

Mishra said the group has received great enthusiasm from students and is accepting more applications. The deadline to apply is Thursday, Oct. 31.

Q&A: Andrew Hening, MBA 17, on solving chronic homelessness

| by Kim Girard
Andrew Hening, MBA 17
Andrew Hening, MBA 17, San Rafael’s director of Homeless Planning & Outreach

As director of Homeless Planning & Outreach for the city of San Rafael, California, Andrew Hening used what he learned in his Evening & Weekend MBA classes to spearhead programs that helped lead to a 28% reduction in chronic homelessness in just two years in Marin County.

We talked to Hening, MBA 17, who grew up in Richmond, Virginia, and previously aspired to be a lawyer, about how he created new approaches to homelessness and why he believes that housing people isn’t as intractable a problem as many people believe.

When did you get interested in working on behalf of homeless people?

After college, I moved back to Richmond to work as a paralegal and study for the LSAT. To my surprise, I quickly realized the law wasn’t for me, and I started taking time off to volunteer in the community. I’d done a lot with youth and tutoring, but then I participated with a Project Homeless Connect event, which is essentially a resource fair for people living outside. It was my first exposure to homelessness, and it had a huge impact on me. Between that experience and my dad, a carpenter, losing his job during the recession, I decided that I had to do something to help economically marginalized people. With that goal in mind, I found AmeriCorps VISTA, which is the domestic version of the Peace Corps, and accepted a job as Santa Clara County Project Homeless Connect Coordinator in 2010.

You’ve been at your current job in San Rafael since 2016. What were some of the challenges you faced after you started?

My first City Council meeting was standing-room-only for a hearing about whether or not the city should revoke the use permit for a local nonprofit. There was this polarized community conversation around whether we needed to provide more services in the community or get rid of existing ones because they were enabling the problem. The truth was somewhere in between. We realized community frustration was really stemming from a small minority of the homeless community – the long-term, chronically homeless. While just 20% of the overall homeless community, these folks often exhibit untreated mental illness and generate other nuisances like public defecation. Importantly, these are also extremely vulnerable people – dying over 20 years earlier than their housed peers. We knew all of these people by name, but year after year they weren’t getting prioritized. In fact, four or five agencies might be serving the same person. There was no coordination, no strategy. So we said if we can figure out a system for them, we can start to fix this.

What happened after you started identifying the chronically homeless?

Our new process is shockingly simple. First and foremost, we finally prioritized chronic homelessness. We made vulnerability the top criteria for getting housing placements, which put the chronically homeless at the top of our housing list. Next, for people at the top of our list, we provided housing subsidies using Section 8 vouchers, a government program that requires people pay a third of their income on rent while the subsidy covers the rest. Additionally, the county hired dedicated landlord recruitment staff with property management experience, which was 200 percent more effective than relying on social workers to recruit landlords. We’ve now brought together county supervisors and city council members and created a public-private coalition with the Marin Community Foundation and the private sector to create even more housing. Finally, every person that gets a housing voucher also gets intensive wraparound services. We like to say that housing is essentially healthcare for these high-needs people.

What are some of the outcomes that you’ve tracked?

During our 18-month pilot that started in March of 2016, we housed 23 of the most visibly, chronically homeless people in the community. After validating this approach, we scaled it and over the last two years housed over 170 of the most vulnerable people in our community. Ninety-five percent of these people are still housed, and in San Rafael we’ve seen a 54% reduction in EMS transports and an 86% reduction in police department calls after people are housed. Amazingly, providing services and housing is roughly 50% cheaper than letting people languish on the streets.

How did your MBA courses help you when you were both designing the new program and educating the community about what you were doing?

Sara Beckman
Sara Beckman, who teaches design thinking at Haas

Being in the EWMBA program was amazing because I was constantly bringing fresh ideas back to the team — so many things that seemed tangential to homelessness but weren’t.  For example, from our operations class, I was seeing ways to apply supply chains and turnover to our housing placements and the speed at which people become and resolve their homelessness.

I also had an incredible mentor in Sara Beckman. After starting to learn design thinking during Applied Innovation, I did an independent study with Sara and also took her course on slums at the Jacobs Institute. Seeing the big picture and using data to analyze it — that really made a big difference. For months I had a floor-to-ceiling sticky note map on the wall in my office trying to map the flow of people through our homeless system of care. It helped make the case to policymakers that the system needed to change.

Do you think that the success you’ve had in Marin County could be replicated in larger cities like San Francisco or LA?

That’s my hope. It’s hard to believe, but in 2017, just as our new strategy was scaling up, Marin County had the 7th highest per capita rate of homelessness in the entire country. We had success here because we got all of the partners in the same room. We identified the people we needed to house, made a list, and started housing them. That’s a lot harder in a big city, but I think it can be scaled by creating smaller jurisdictions inside a city, including smaller populations of a couple of hundred people, as well as leveraging technology to communicate and coordinate.

The other tricky part is staying focused on housing. Across California, only about 30% of people who are homeless have access to shelter. It’s a humanitarian disaster, but the solution is more than housing. To the extent that communities invest in emergency shelter, it comes back to the idea of the operational supply chain: what is the pathway to permanent housing?

You’re writing a book about what caused modern homelessness. What is the goal?

I started writing this book about what’s causing this modern homelessness crisis after I finished the EWMBA program. I spent two years researching and writing. Now I’m finalizing a book proposal. The goal is to get it out to the general public, providing stories and solutions to end this. It’s so easy to talk about the negative stuff. I’m hoping to make people feel empowered to make a difference.

 

Haas unveils revamped sustainable and impact finance program

| by Kim Girard

Katharine Hawthorne, MBA 20, came to Haas to build a career in impact investing.

Katharine Hawthorne, MBA 20, came to Haas to build a career in impact investing.
Katharine Hawthorne, MBA 20, came to Haas to build a career in impact investing.

She’s found plenty to dive into so far—as co-president of the Haas Private Equity Club, a principal of the school’s student-run social impact fund, and a summer intern at Patamar Capital in Jakarta, helping to make investment decisions in high-growth companies in South and Southeast Asia.

Now in her second year at Haas, she’ll be able to go even deeper, in a newly expanded sustainable and impact investing program that Berkeley Haas rolled out last week. The program, called Sustainable and Impact Finance, or SAIF, is focused on three sectors: sustainable investment, impact investment, and impact entrepreneurship.

Moving to the next level

By creating the new pathways, the program will better position students who aim to work in sustainable and impact finance as public fund managers or private equity investors, or in the startup world.

Assoc. Prof. Adair Morse spent the past year developing the new program with Prof. Laura Tyson, faculty director for the Institute for Business and Social Impact (IBSI).

SAIF includes new courses, expanded activities, research projects, internships, and student investment fund management opportunities in impact finance, which differs from traditional investment finance because investors aim for both positive financial return and a positive impact on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) outcomes, as well as social justice. In class, students learn how to evaluate a company based on its ESG performance.

Assoc. Prof. Adair Morse
Assoc. Prof. Adair Morse, faculty director of the new Sustainable and Impact Finance program.

“With SAIF, we’re continuing the Berkeley Haas tradition of thought leadership in sustainability and impact in finance and entrepreneurship,” Tyson said. “There’s deep interest in sustainable and impact investing careers at Haas, and our existing courses and activities, including the student-run Haas Socially Responsible Investment Fund, have been enormously successful.  SAIF will build on this strong foundation, enabling us to move to the next level in an organized, targeted, and meaningful way that keeps pace with rapid changes in sustainable and impact investing and impact entrepreneurship.”

“Haas needs to continue to lead the way in these areas,” said Morse, faculty director for SAIF. “The world is changing and we have issues of climate change, supply chain transparency, gender diversity, and social justice to take care of and this should be fully integrated into the business curriculum.”

A pioneer in corporate social responsibility

Photo of Prof. Laura Tyson
“We’re continuing the Berkeley Haas tradition,” – Prof. Laura Tyson, who worked on the SAIF initiative for the past year.

In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Haas was ranked the top graduate business school in sustainable finance and investing, according to data from the QS World University Rankings. The school is a pioneer in social impact investing, with efforts beginning during the late 1950s when late Dean Budd Cheit launched the first courses on corporate social responsibility. Haas now offers a total of nine courses devoted to the topic, more than any other school, as well as several others that cover related topics such as social impact metrics and impact ventures.

SAIF’s three tracks are designed to emphasize different aspects of impact investing. The course pathways are:

  • Sustainable investment: This track trains students to be managers of and investors in sustainable/responsible/ESG investment portfolios, primarily in publicly traded stocks and bonds. First-year courses include “Financial Information Analysis” and “Sustainable Portfolio Construction,” followed by a full year of investment work with the $3 million Sustainable Investment Fund. The fund, formerly called the Haas Socially Responsible Investment Fund, was founded in 2007 and has graduated over 90 students. Enrolled students become fund managers, analyzing investments and constructing and managing a portfolio.

    Haas students who manage the sustainable investment fund.
    MBA students who have managed the Sustainable Investment Fund at Haas, formerly called the Haas Socially Responsible Investment Fund. Photo: Jim Block
  • Impact investment:  Impact investing, a term coined by the Rockefeller Foundation in 2007, includes investments that generate financial returns and create a positive impact. This track prepares students for investment careers in private equity, venture capital, and real assets. Courses include “Impact Finance & Entrepreneurship” and “Impact Venture Partners: Portfolio.” Another course, “Impact Investing Practicum,” places student teams with impact investors to complete pre-vetted projects. Haas has placed seven teams, a total of 20 students, over the past several years in projects for clients including Omidyar, Salesforce, Patagonia, Cambridge Associates, and Gratitude Railroad.

    Photo of Jessie Tang, MBA 20
    Jessie Tang, MBA 20, worked on an impact investing project for Gratitude Railroad.
  • Impact entrepreneurship: This track helps students understand social impact financing from both a fund perspective and a startup perspective. Courses include “Impact Startup Launchpad” (previously Social Lean Launchpad), and “New Venture Finance.” Haas entrepreneurship lecturer Jorge Calderon leads the pathway, which includes management of a new fund called Berkeley Impact Venture Partners. The fund has a dual strategy: The “catalyst fund” provides startup teams at the pre-seed stage with $5,000 grants, while the “scale fund” helps startup teams, on or off campus, that are further along in their development with larger market rate equity investments. Electives for students in this track include “Food Innovation Studio,” “Impact Disco,” and “Social Impact Metrics.”
Haas entrepreneurship lecturer Jorge Calderon leads the entrepreneurship pathway
Haas Lecturer Jorge Calderon leads the impact entrepreneurship pathway of the new SAIF program.

Jessie Tang, MBA 20, said the pathways are a great way to formalize all of the program’s offerings. “I like that they’re trying to put more of a framework around this,” said Tang, who was on a team assigned last spring to an Impact Investing Practicum project with Gratitude Railroad, an alternative investment platform committed to solving environmental and social problems. “They’re working out ways to help the students navigate the course offerings in a better way.”

Growing interest in impact investing careers

Additional members of the SAIF team, who helped develop parts of the program and will also teach courses, include William Rindfuss, executive director of strategic programs, Julia Sze, a lecturer in social leadership, Ben Mangan, executive director for the Center for Social Sector Leadership, Nora Silver, founder and faculty director with the Center for Social Sector Leadership, and Assoc. Prof. Panos Patatoukas, who is launching new research on impact finance.

Tang, who will be the Graduate School Instructor (GSI) for the Impact Finance & Entrepreneurship class Morse is teaching this fall, is among a growing group of Haas students and alumni working in social and impact investing, including Patrick Hamm, MBA 20, who was a research analyst intern at Parnassus Investments, a pioneer in socially responsible investments, in San Francisco last summer; Adrian Rodrigues, MBA 18, who is co-founder and managing partner of Hyphae Partners, which works with businesses to develop and finance regenerative business models; Zeina Fayyaz Kim, MBA 16, an associate partner at NewSchools Venture Fund in Oakland, a national nonprofit venture philanthropy fund focused on public education; and Zach Knight, MBA 15, who is a co-founder and partner of Blue Forest Conservation, which works to protect forest health through a forest resilience bond.

Alex Lopez, EMBA 20: Honored after serving in Benghazi, fighting for banking equity

| by Kim Girard
Alex (second from right) with a group of Marines at the US Navy vs Notre Dame Game in Dublin, Ireland in September 2012.
Alex Lopez (second from right) with fellow Marines at the US Navy vs Notre Dame Game in Dublin, Ireland, in September 2012

In honor of Latinx Heritage Month, we’re featuring interviews with members of our Latinx community.

After the attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi that killed four Americans in 2012, U.S. Marine Sgt. Alex Lopez, EMBA 20, was deployed to Libya, where he led a team that provided support to the U.S. Embassy as Americans were evacuated.

Outside of work and class, Alex Lopez, EMBA 20, a vice president at U.S. Bank, teaches financial literacy to ESL students in Nevada.

Now a student in the Berkeley Executive MBA program and a vice president at the U.S. Bank in Las Vegas, Lopez has post-graduation plans to continue assisting people from Latinx backgrounds with financial literacy.

We talked to Lopez, who was born in Chihuahua, Mexico, about his time in the Marine Corps, and his new project to promote financial literacy in schools.

Where did you grow up?

I was a teenager when I came to the U.S. with my dad. I came to Las Vegas in 2006. After I graduated high school, I joined the Marines. I wanted to change the world….That was important to me. My siblings were in the Navy and Army so I decided to enlist in the Marines, and spent five years serving.

Tell me about your role as a Marine after the attacks in Benghazi, Libya.

Right after American Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Sept. 11, 2012, our company received the call to deploy as part of Operation Jukebox Lotus. We were a hand-selected group, assisting the Department of State with evacuation, protecting people and assets at a time of extreme diplomatic sensitivity. Four Americans lost their lives during the Benghazi attacks.

Our small military company had limited knowledge and experience, since none of us had operated in Libya before. I learned that in the presence of chaos, I had to take the initiative to complete every task to the best of my ability, whether it was high priority or something seemingly unimportant. I’m confident that during those extreme times of uncertainty that the Marine Corps’ leadership principles were critical to preserving the integrity of my Marines. When we returned, our company was recognized with the Meritorious Honor Award by the Department of the State.

Alex on board the USS Fort Henry as part of the Marine Corps Ground Combat Element in August 2012
Lopez on board the USS Fort McHenry in August 2012

Did you always want to go to business school?

I moved to the U.S. to pursue an education. Business school was always attractive to me, but I never knew what I wanted to do in business. I was involved in college in leadership positions and by the time I graduated from college I had several offers from banks, and so I started my career in finance. One of the reasons why I decided to come to Berkeley for an MBA is because Haas truly embodies diversity and inclusiveness across the board. Learning from a diverse executive MBA class is enriching and furthering my capacity to innovate and go beyond my own possibilities.

Why did you choose to study finance?

My grandmother owned a restaurant. I grew up watching her and my family manage it. One thing that made a big impact is how basic financial literacy concepts could have helped the family-owned business to flourish in a more efficient way. In Mexico, I noticed a big disconnect between small businesses and banks. There’s a lack of financial literacy in Mexico that stops people from getting the help they need. This is true in the U.S., too.

Lopez (age 3 in photo) immigrated to America from Mexico at age 13 with his father.

You are already working on fixing this in your community?

Outside of work, I’m working on a project with a couple of friends from college. We go to community schools in Clark County, Nevada, that offer English as a Second Language (ESL) classes and provide a 30-45 minute workshop that focuses on basic finance topics like compound interest, retirement plans, home mortgages, personal and business loans, and credit cards. We’ve received extremely positive feedback so we hope to take the next step on this project and provide a more efficient way to increase financial literacy within the Latinx community.

What aspect of your cultural heritage do you enjoy most?

Food. Mexican dishes are very popular worldwide—tacos, burritos, enchiladas, and tamales. I love that in every part of the U.S. or the world I visit I can always count on Mexican food to be there. Our traditional food and culture is well-known worldwide, and I love to be able to eat tacos pretty much anywhere.

 

Paula Fernández-Baca, MBA 21: dancer, educator, and proud Peruvian-American

| by Kim Girard
Paula with Berkeley Haas sign
Paula poses with the Haas sign shortly after arriving in Berkeley.

In honor of Latinx Heritage Month, we’re featuring interviews with members of our Latinx community.

Paula Fernández-Baca, MBA 21, grew up in Houston, a self-proclaimed very proud Texan. Her parents immigrated from Peru to the U.S. during the 1980s. Like many first-generation kids, Fernández-Baca grew up straddling the cultures of two worlds. We talked to Fernández-Baca about her family background & love of dance, her passion for empowering underrepresented minority students through education, and her new life at Haas.

Tell us a bit about your family background.

Nearly all of my family is still in Peru, with the exception of my parents and two brothers. As a child we’d go to Peru to visit over the summer, and I was basically “the American cousin.” My family there would call me gringa and make fun of my Spanish, so while of course everyone loved each other, I didn’t always feel like I could fully “fit in.” In Houston on the other hand, the Hispanic community was (and still is) very centered around Mexican culture. I guess growing up, people weren’t as culturally aware back then, because often people would get so confused when I’d tell them I was Hispanic but not Mexican. It was weird.

Five year old Paula (right) posing in costume with a fellow Mi Peru dancer before performing at a cultural festival in Texas.
Five-year-old Paula (right) in costume with a fellow Mi Peru dancer before performing at a cultural festival in Texas.

That being said, my family did find Peruvian community in Texas. My parents were involved in  the Peruvian Association of Houston, and through that they helped start a dance group called Grupo Folklorico Mi Perú. The community built from that group kind of became my extended family in the U.S. A lot of the kids who I danced with I’m still in touch with. They were kind of like my cousins growing up, because my real cousins were a plane ride away.

Did you love to dance as a kid?

I love Latin dancing and have a lot of childhood memories of dancing. We’d host dance practices at people’s houses that would eventually morph into big parties of salsa, Colombian cumbia, and whatever was popular in the Latin community at the time. In general I gravitate to the performing arts because of my personality, so as I’ve gotten older, I’ve taken formal salsa classes and learned how to do other styles, like bachata for example.

How did your career in education align with your heritage?

Going through Teach for America and teaching at KIPP (a charter school network) was important to me because I wanted to serve the community I grew up in. After going to high school and college on the east coast, I came back to Houston and taught 5th and 6th-grade Spanish, both a “non-native” Spanish I class, and a “native-level” class for kids that came from Hispanic backgrounds but had limited Spanish literacy skills. In my native-level class, I spent a lot of time trying to empower my Hispanic students  to think about themselves as the future leaders of the U.S., and that they should take pride in both their culture and in learning Spanish. Even though I haven’t been a teacher for a while now, I hope I can use my career to continue to empower people who come from similar backgrounds as me to see their culture as an important part of their leadership—and not something they should accommodate for others.

Paula (in the pink sweater!) with a group of her 5th grade students in 2014 at KIPP 3D Academy in Houston, Texas.
Paula (in pink sweater) with a group of her fifth grade students in 2014 at KIPP 3D Academy in Houston, Texas.

Have you found a welcoming community at Haas?

Paula with her parents at commencement.
Paula with her parents at undergraduate commencement

I knew business school was going to be a very different experience, and during the application process I was really worried about whether I’d find people who’d share my values. I went to high school at a private boarding school in Connecticut, and then to Johns Hopkins for college, so I’d been a part of predominantly white institutions for higher education before.

I got a great education in college, but have had to go on my own journey to try to figure out how to express my heritage and identity in a such a way that people around me see it as valuable, rather than “oh, that’s a cute quirk you have.” Because of that, I was trying to find a business school community where I’d feel valued and accepted. What Haas has done over the last year (in terms of diversity, equity and inclusion) was a selling point for me, even though truth-be-told I was cautiously optimistic about it. I’ve heard a lot of grand overtures from different institutions about these type of issues in the past, and it’s often not implemented well. So far, I’ve been generally pleasantly surprised. I have also found a Latin community both with people in The Consortium and among international Latin American students. Everyone here has been so, so kind.

 

Haas performs well in two new rankings

| by Kim Girard

The Full-Time Berkeley MBA program is ranked #9 in the world by QS and is #11 in the US on Forbes’ list of Best Business Schools 2019.

The QS ranking is based on an employer survey, an academic survey and data provided by participating business schools. Each ranked school’s overall score factors inemployability (40%), return on investment (20%), entrepreneurship and other alumni outcomes (15%), thought leadership (15%), and class and faculty diversity (10%).

The Forbes ranking, published on September 18, is based on the five-year return on investment achieved by MBA graduates from the class of 2014. It weighs the salary increases post-MBA against the opportunity costs of forgone salary, tuition, and required fees. Forbes included more than 100 schools in its ranking and reached out to 17,500 alumni around the globe for the 2019 ranking.

The Berkeley MBA class of 2014 reported a five-year salary gain of about $75,000 on a pre-MBA salary of $88,000, compared to a 2018 salary of $205,000. Alumni reported a payback time of 4.1 years.

Forbes has ranked the top MBA programs based on their ROI biennially since 1999.

New Berkeley Haas artificial intelligence initiative to focus on inclusivity

| by Kim Girard

Well into Beena Ammanath’s career as a leader for data science teams in artificial intelligence, she often found herself the only woman at the table.

“As I set up AI teams, there were never enough women,” said Ammanath, who is co-president of the new Alliance for Inclusive Artificial Intelligence (AIAI), launched this month by the Fisher Center for Business Analytics at Haas. “I couldn’t hire them and I couldn’t find them, and it became really obvious that we did not have enough women or underrepresented minorities. I knew that AI wouldn’t be as robust or safe if you didn’t have them involved in this process, where we’re encoding human intelligence and human bias.”

Gauthier Vasseur and Beena Ammanath, founders of the AIAI initiative with Haas
Beena Ammanath, who was honored as Businesswoman of the Year at last year’s Fisher Center for Business Analytics summit, and Gauthier Vasseur, the executive director of the Fisher Center for Business Analytics, are leading the new AIAI initiative at Berkeley Haas. Photo: Jim Block

To help solve the problem, Ammanath, a managing director at Deloitte and founder of the nonprofit Humans for AI, joined Gauthier Vasseur, the executive director of the Fisher Center for Business Analytics, to launch  the new AIAI initiative at Berkeley Haas.

The alliance is focused on building a more inclusive future for women and underrepresented minorities in AI.

Plans include fundraising for scholarships and educational activities around AI and analytics; new programs that promote awareness of AI and inclusion; plans to host conferences on AI and analytics; new courses and access to learning within AI research projects; professional training and coaching and career support; and support for internships, job placement, and ongoing mentoring from AI experts.

“AI is the future and it has the potential to profoundly transform the work that people will do,” said Assoc. Prof. Zsolt Katona, faculty director for the Fisher Center for Business Analytics, which is part of the Institute for Business Innovation (IBI). “Haas plays a unique role within the Berkeley artificial intelligence ecosystem, with its focus on educating the next generation of business managers and leaders. With the sweeping changes that AI will bring, it’s critical that everybody has the opportunity to weigh in on how AI is used and who uses it, not just one group.”

“AI…has the potential to profoundly transform the work that people will do.” – Assoc. Prof. Zsolt Katona.

Associate Adjunct Prof. Thomas Y. Lee, the Fisher Center’s director of data science, notes that Haas’ comparative advantage is not in building better algorithms. By training leaders, Haas will influence how AIs are trained and how they are applied to benefit society. “This is about how you encourage people to get involved, how you think about collecting the data, how you train systems, and how you evaluate impact,” he said. “As this world evolves and matures, there are a lot more ways to be inclusive and build a better society and the idea is that the technology can be used in positive and negative ways. Haas is in the business of preparing leaders to take on the bias.”

The new AIAI initiative was founded last spring after Ammanath and Vasseur met and realized that they both shared similar views about AI— computer systems that interpret and learn from data to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence.

Vasseur, who is co-president of the alliance, said people on teams aren’t often asking the right questions, and are susceptible to groupthink.

photo of Thomas Lee
“Haas is in the business of preparing leaders to take on the bias,” Assoc. Adjunct Prof. Thomas Y. Lee.

“This is counterproductive for many companies and closes so many doors—when they are not being diverse in their analytics process, their data collection, and their analysis,” said Vasseur, a data analytics industry veteran and teacher who previously worked at Google and Oracle. “They need to see the big picture and pay attention to details. You won’t get that with a team of only white males.”

While a lack of diversity is a well-documented problem at tech companies, a recent study by WIRED magazine and Montreal startup Element AI estimated that only about 12% of leading machine learning researchers are women. That estimate came from tallying the numbers of men and women who had contributed work at three top machine learning conferences in 2017.

Hoping for better representation for both women and underrepresented minorities in AI, Celeste Fa’ai’uaso, MBA 20, a mechanical engineer who is co-president of the Haas Data Science Club, said she’s planning to meet with AIAI organizers.

The potential problem with AI, she says, is that people are using data to train these algorithms without considering how the data could be biased or how systemic issues can cause the patterns we see today, and whether the data is accurate or representative of many groups. “There’s been a lot of hype and excitement around AI and the thing I worry about is garbage in, garbage out,” she said. “We live in a world today where there are inequities and biases. If you take the data from that world to train machine learning and AI algorithms, we risk reinforcing these inequities even more.”

Ammanath, who was honored as Businesswoman of the Year at last year’s Fisher Center for Business Analytics summit, wrote in a recent LinkedIn blog post that to avoid bias, an artificial intelligence system should ideally have many data sources, from as wide a range of viewpoints as possible.

Examples of this that she cited include when Nikon created a camera that could detect if someone blinked at the crucial moment—but did not take into account that not all people around the world have the same shaped eyes—and when Winterlight Labs built auditory tests for neurological diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis that only worked for English speakers of a particular Canadian dialect.

“The problem with AI comes when we knowingly or unknowingly expose the engine to data which only tells one story or does not show the whole picture,” she wrote.

Haas welcomes more than a thousand new students to campus

| by Kim Girard
photo of the new MBA class
The new full-time MBA class! Photo: Benny Johnson

Haas welcomed new students in the full-time MBA, undergraduate, and PhD programs to campus this month for orientation and the start of fall semester. New students in the evening & weekend MBA program arrived earlier this summer, beginning classes July 29.

Full-time Berkeley MBA Program

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Photos of the Cohort Olympics by Jim Block.

The theme of diversity and inclusion in business ran throughout orientation, also known as Week Zero, for the 283 new students in the full-time MBA class, with sessions on diversity and leadership led by Director of Inclusion & Diversity Élida Bautista, and new Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer David Porter.

“We chose the diversity and inclusion theme intentionally this year and we wove it throughout the week,” said Peter Johnson, assistant dean full-time MBA program and admissions. “We want to help our students better understand the business case for diversity and the importance of becoming leaders who are able to effectively guide a diverse and inclusive organization.”

The week kicked off with alumni speaker and Cisco executive Nikita Mitchell, MBA 15, and continued with a business case reveal Tuesday and surprise visitors: executives from global investment management firm BlackRock (students had read a case about BlackRock’s diversity efforts before arriving). Weijian Shan, PhD 87, chairman and CEO of PAG Group, launched the fall Dean’s Speaker Series, discussing his new book “Out of the Gobi: My Story of China and America.” (Watch the video of Shan’s talk here.)

Class members also met their study teams, worked together at an urban farm at the Alameda Point Collaborative, and competed in the annual Cohort Olympics.

Photo of BlackRock's Frank Cooper, who surprised the MBA students
Frank Cooper, global CMO of BlackRock, makes his way to the stage, as surprised students react to BlackRock’s visit. Photo: Benny Johnson

The incoming class of MBA students is comprised of 37% women. U.S. minorities are 30% of the class overall, and underrepresented minorities comprise 14% of the class (or 22% of just the U.S. students). They include a total of 41 African American, Hispanic American, and Native American students—a sharp increase from last year, when they were 7% of the class (11% of the U.S. students). The group is 35% international, hailing from 39 countries; India, China, Brazil, Peru, Canada, Japan, and Mexico are the top represented countries.

Dean Ann Harrison photo by Jim Block
Dean Ann Harrison: “We have really high expectations of you.” Photo: Jim Block

Dean Ann Harrison, addressing her first entering MBA class as dean, urged students to take time to really get to know each other, and to take advantage of the Haas alumni and broader UC Berkeley network. “This place is awesome, and it’s also awesomely demanding,” she said. “We have really high expectations of you. How hard you work this year will immediately pay off.”

Students in the class have an average of five years work experience, 20% in consulting, 17% in finance and financial services, and 11% in the nonprofit world. The class includes 24 veterans.

Morgan Bernstein, executive director of full-time MBA admissions, called out many students by name during a reception, including Manny Smith, who competed at the Team USA World Sprinter Championships and was the Armed Forces Men’s Track Champion in 2017; Randall Nixon, a Division 1 football college quarterback; Margie Cadet, a trained doula who helped expectant mothers; Jung Bahk, a back-up dancer for K-pop singers; and Daniela Kurinaga, who helped give 600 small & medium enterprises their first access to credit at Banco Credito del Peru.

MBA students break into study groups to get to know each other.
MBA students met their study groups during orientation. Photo: Jim Block

Students said they are excited to begin classes.

“If Week Zero is a representation of what the next two years at Haas will be like, it will likely be the best two years of my life,” said Soniya Parmar, MBA 21, who is from India.

Undergraduate Program

The new class of undergraduate students—an international group of music lovers, cooks, speakers of multiple languages, athletes, travelers, and photographers—kicked off orientation Tuesday in Spieker Forum in Chou Hall. Dean Harrison welcomed the students, professional faculty members Todd Fitch and Krystal Thomas led a discussion on thriving in the Berkeley Haas community. Chief DEI Officer David Porter and Derek Brown, a Berkeley Haas PhD candidate, steered sessions on team building and leadership.

Of the 362 incoming undergraduate students, 265 are continuing UC Berkeley students and 97 transferred into the program. Continuing students held an average GPA of 3.67 and transfer students’ GPA averages 3.89.  The class was accepted from a total of 2,663 applicants.

In addition, 49 undergraduate students in the Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology program (M.E.T.) started this week. The program, a collaboration between the Haas School of Business and the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, grants graduates two degrees—in business and in engineering—in four years, with the goal of providing deep leadership and technology skills.

Over the summer, 28 new students arrived in the undergraduate Global Management Program, a selective, four-year international Berkeley Haas program that launched in 2018. On top of an already demanding undergraduate curriculum, students must fulfill a language requirement, study abroad their first semester, and take specialized global business courses.

“We’re so proud of this international, talented new class,” said Erika Walker, assistant dean of the Haas Undergraduate Program “They’ve achieved amazing feats academically and are going beyond themselves in so many ways inside and outside of the classroom. We can’t wait to see what they do.”

All of the new undergrad students received new Berkeley Haas backpacks.
Entering undergrad students show off their new Berkeley Haas backpacks. Photo: Dinko Lakic

Evening & Weekend MBA Program

The 279 new students in the Evening & Weekend Berkeley MBA Program gathered for their WE Launch orientation July 26-28 at the Doubletree Berkeley Marina, where they were assigned to a cohort of 70 to 75 students for their core courses.

Students in the EWMBA program balance their classes while working full time. Class members work for a total of 216 companies—23% in high tech, 11% in computer related services, and 9% in consulting. The top job role is engineering (18%), followed by marketing and sales (15%).

New evening and weekend students gather
The 279 new students in the EWMBA class participate in We Launch orientation before starting classes. Photo: Jim Block

Seventy-nine percent of the class lives and work in the Bay Area, although the students hail from 21 countries. More than a third of the class are women and the median student age is 30.

A few fun facts: one student was an extra in the 2011 Steven Soderbergh movie “Contagion,” while another founded the Bay area’s Greenfoot Hiking Club, which has more than 350 members. The class also includes a former pro baseball player and an opera singer. Many of the students are multi-lingual (one even speaks seven languages).

PhD Program

Twelve new students began the PhD program this year, bringing the total number of the students in the program to 71.

New PhD student photo of the class
The new class of PhD students. Top row, left to right: Top row, l-r: Pavel Bacherikov, Yixiang Xu, Shoshana Jarvis, Charlie Townsend, Jaeyeon Lee, Yunhao Huang. Bottom row, l-r: Morgan Foy, Saqib Choudhary, Sandy Campbell, William Ryan, Summer Zhao, Konhee Chang Summer Zhao. Photo: Jim Block

The new students are international, hailing from China, Russia, Korea, and India and from universities including Carnegie Mellon, Higher School of Economics Moscow, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, Duke, UC Berkeley, and Tsinghua University.

Their research areas range from the impact of gender bias on women to why people make systematic errors with certain types of choices. “It’s always so exciting to follow our students as they work their way through this rigorous program, to learn about their fascinating research, and ultimately how it contributes to their field,” said Melissa Hacker, the program’s director of student affairs.

You are welcome here: Q@Haas reaches out to new admits

| by Kim Girard

Wyatt Davis arrived at Haas for full-time MBA orientation last Friday already surrounded by people she considers friends.

Wyatt Davis
Wyatt Davis, MBA 21. Photo: Jim Block

Back in December, she’d been assigned a buddy, Katie Rentz, MBA 20, with whom she shared a passion for triathlons, and the two of them hit it off immediately. By the time Davis visited for admit weekend, she had met so many students on the Q@Haas Whatsapp that many recognized her name and welcomed her as a new member of the group.

“It is really comforting to arrive with friends and a support system already in place,” said Davis, a native of Concord, Massachusetts, who came out as gay three years ago. “Q@Haas was a huge draw for me when applying, and it’s exciting to be in a place where I can really dive into the strong and healthy community and make it part of my experience here.”

Haas over the decades has built a strong queer community in the full-time MBA program, working hand in hand with Q@Haas, the student-run organization that supports LGBTQ students, partners, and allies. This year, the number of admits who identified as LGBTQ during the application process held steady at about 20 students, or 7 percent of the class.

But that number typically grows throughout the year, says Minh Leu, MBA 20, vice president of admissions for Q@Haas. “There are always more students who either missed that section of the application or decided not to identify themselves while applying,” Leu said, noting that in the class of 2020, about 10 more people had come out by year’s end, bringing the total closer to 30.

Being “my whole self”

Q@Haas creates an environment where people feel safe and welcome, students say.

“I wanted to be my whole self and I was more sure that I could do that here than at any other school,” said Fayzan Gowani, MBA 21, who identifies as gender non-binary. During the application process, Gowani, who is from Los Angeles and spent recent years working in international development in Kenya and Kyrgystan, reached out to a second-year Q@Haas student who could speak to Haas’ diverse queer culture.

Talin Abrahamian, associate director of admissions for the full-time MBA program, credits student commitment for much of the school’s LGBTQ traction.

“People come to Haas for our culture and the desire to build a community early on,” said Abrahamian, who is the LGBT+ designated point person in admissions. “Our Q@Haas students play an important role because they have lived the experience of being Q-identified. We have a strong relationship with these admits, but they are the ones who really sell the program.”

Fayzan Gowani
Fayzan Gowani, MBA 21. Photo: Jim Block

While Q@Haas leaders say they won’t change what’s worked to date for the group—such as buddy assignments and WhatsApp—there are a few new efforts, including a welcome party to introduce students from both classes to each other, a potluck at HaasBoats, an Oakland Pride Brunch, and prep sessions for Reaching out MBA (ROMBA), an LGBTQ-focused MBA conference in October. (Last fall, 40 Haas students attended ROMBA, up four-fold from the prior year.)

Q@Haas also worked to bring Backstage Capital founder Arlan Hamilton, who invests in people of color and LGBTQ startup founders, to campus next month for a Dean’s Speaker Series event.

“Elevating this conversation to the Dean’s Speaker Series level is a great reflection of the support the administration has given to students to shape the campus agenda,” said John Monaghan, MBA 20, and Q@Haas’ vice president of onboarding.

Easing the path to coming out

A big part of the Q@Haas mission is to reach all students — no matter where they are on the path toward discovering and sharing their own sexual identities. For students from conservative backgrounds or foreign countries where homosexuality and other sexual and gender identities are stigmatized or even illegal, guarantees of anonymity can be especially critical.

Alan Man, who is co-president of Q@Haas, was born in China and raised in New Zealand, where he grew up in an environment where he didn’t feel comfortable disclosing his homosexuality.

Alan Man, MBA 20
Alan Man, MBA 20

Man came out to friends at age 20 and parents at age 25, when he was planning to move to Australia to be with his now-husband. He interned this past summer at fintech company Credit Karma with the head of diversity and inclusion to drive more inclusion at the company.

“I know from experience how difficult the process of coming out is and that everyone is on a different journey,” said Man. “Whatever their choice, we want students to feel comfortable with themselves and supported and safe so they can bring their authentic self to both work and business school.”

On the careers side, company recruiters and Haas alumni who are committed to sexual diversity and inclusion host get-togethers on campus. McKinsey & Company and Google, for example, meet Q@Haas members over dinner. The chief financial officer of Ford North America was one of several alumni to hold informal chats about their experience as queers in the workplace.

“It’s important that we show LGBTQ students that they can be successful, even if they face challenges because of their sexual identity,” said Darren Le, MBA 19, the first-ever vice president of career services at Q@Haas.

—Krysten Crawford contributed to this article.

Questioning the status quo: a Q&A with Chief DEI Officer David Porter

| by Kim Girard
David Porter, Haas' first chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, started July 15. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small
David Porter, Haas’ first chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, started July 15. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small

David Porter, Berkeley Haas’ new chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, believes in questioning the status quo—which happens to be his favorite Defining Leadership Principle.

“I’m not a ‘follow the rules’ kind of guy,” said Porter, who started his job July 15. But before he shakes things up, Porter is getting acclimated with the Haas campus and community, meeting with his team, and setting his priorities.

Porter comes to Haas from the Walter Kaitz Foundation, a media nonprofit, where he served as CEO. He’s also the former director of graduate programs at the Howard University School of Business and was an assistant professor and faculty director at UCLA’s Anderson School.

We sat down to interview him last week.

Tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, although I was born in Nashville. Kansas City was a great place to grow up. It was a large enough city that you had access to all the city stuff, but it wasn’t so big that my parents had to worry about my safety. Of course, it was a different time, so as long as you were in by the time the lights came on, it was all good. My father was a pediatrician. My mother was an assistant dean at the University of Kansas Medical Center, where she ran the medical center’s diversity programs. I have one sister, who’s now a psychiatrist.

When did you first come out to California?

In 1981, I drove cross-country to attend Stanford, where I stayed for eight years. At Stanford, I was very active in the black community. In addition, I was elected president of the student body and later served as the chair of the student senate. These experiences helped shape my understanding of universities and honed my leadership skills. As a student activist, I was the guy who often stood in the middle working to negotiate creative solutions with the administration.

My experience as a leader helped prepare me to serve on Stanford’s University Committee on Minority Issues. This was my first opportunity to think strategically about how one might diversify an organization. The committee was created in response to student protests in the spring of 1987. Its role was to make a comprehensive review of the entire institution. We worked for two years to develop a report which made numerous recommendations, many of which were adopted. That’s where I developed a lot of the skills around exercising influence without authority which I still use to this day.

What drew you to this position at Haas?

What I was really looking for was an organization where I thought the leaders were serious. A lot of diversity roles are what I call “diversity eye candy.” These companies often hire individuals who will come in and make the organization look good, without making real change. When I saw this role, I said to myself, “Let’s go through the process and see.” And as I went through the process, it seemed like Haas was serious with the DEI action plan. The fact that Haas has responded so energetically to the issues raised was impressive. You don’t often see a dean and her senior staff say they’re going to take the next 30 days to dig into a problem and actually take specific actions to address it.

When you first read our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion plan, what did you think of it?

I think it outlined some great first steps. For example, it recognized that the admissions process has some inherent biases which needed to be addressed. It also made some quick changes that were critical to impact the incoming class and it identified additional resources, including the expansion of the DEI team.  These efforts helped Haas to yield a critical mass of underrepresented students in the incoming class. It is my hope and expectation that these students will have a great experience which they will be able to share with future prospective students.

What are your first priorities here at Haas?

My first priority is making sure that the students, particularly students of color, have the best experience possible. I don’t want any of them to say, “Hey, this was a bad choice for me.” Part of that will be about meeting with them, being a good mentor, being a good resource. Another part of it will be working with my team to make sure that the environment continues moving in the direction that we’re going: to become more inclusive, to make sure that we put true meaning in the word “equity.”

I’d also like to get a better understanding of all the diversity activities going on at Haas. I’ve been amazed that in almost every conversation I’ve had, I’ve learned of another diversity initiative or an individual who has taken it upon themselves to do something to make this place more inclusive. I want to know what everyone is doing regarding diversity-related efforts and I’d love to create a big flow chart, because I think that we can do a better job of telling that story. I also think that better coordination could take place. All of those people who are doing that diversity work in addition to their regular day jobs—they are instant allies.

What are some of the things that can be done inside of the classroom?

There are lots of ways in which we can make a more inclusive experience in the classroom. For example, including more cases with diverse protagonists or covering diversity-related topics or bringing in more diverse guest speakers.  Hopefully, over time as our students see a broader range of individuals who are successful leaders, their view of what a successful leader looks like will change.

Will African American enrollment increase this fall and do you think that will change the campus environment?

We don’t have the final numbers yet, but we’re definitely expecting to have more African American students on campus this fall.

Every class comes in with a different mix. You can never really predict who will step up early on as leaders. But I do think that when you have a more diverse group of folks, there are more ingredients in the mix, and if Haas does a good job of creating an inclusive environment where everyone can come in and feel like they can be who they are and contribute actively, it will be a great experience for everyone.

Dean Harrison signs national diversity & inclusion pledge

| by Kim Girard
Dean Ann Harrison signing the CEO Action for Diversity and Inclusion Pledge at Haas. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small

Haas Dean Ann Harrison this week signed The CEO Action for Diversity & Inclusion pledge, joining 50 academic institutions and more than 750 CEOs supporting the sweeping national diversity commitment.

Through the pledge, spearheaded by accounting & consulting firm PwC, Harrison agreed to create environments that support open discussions about diversity and inclusion; to implement and expand unconscious bias education; and to share both successful—and unsuccessful—actions with members and the broader community.

“When I arrived at Haas, I realized that the school did not reflect the diversity of the surrounding community, and this pledge is part of my ongoing commitment to change that,” Harrison said. “Through this new initiative, we’ll continue to move forward in implementing best practices that will help take our DEI [diversity, equity, and inclusion] efforts to the next level.”

At the signing, three PwC partners, who are also UC Berkeley alumni, joined Harrison: Jane C. Allen, BS 95 (College of Natural Resources), PwC firm relationship partner for UC Berkeley recruiting; Kevin Schwartz, MBA 98, the PwC liaison for recruiting for the Berkeley MBA program; and Laura Martinez, MBA 89.

“We’re thrilled that we’re having this meeting today to start the conversation,” Martinez said. Allen said Haas’ pledge is about sharing what’s worked at the university level. “A plan is in place,” she said. “We can talk about facilitating the plan and the tools that we have that can be leveraged and what Haas would be willing to share with others.”

Group shot from diversity pledge meeting at Haas
Left-right: John Clamme, director of corporate partnerships at Haas, Marco Lindsey, former dean’s chief of staff who is transitioning to a new diversity role at Haas; Jane Allen (PwC); Dean Ann Harrison; Laura Martinez (PwC); Kevin Schwartz (PwC); and Haas’ new Chief Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Officer David Porter joined the pledge signing meeting.

A focus on both companies and universities

PwC launched the CEO Action initiative in 2017 after the company’s U.S. Chairman Tim Ryan initiated a series of companywide conversations about race.

Today, the effort continues to expand, addressing diversity and inclusion on behalf of groups including African Americans, Latinx, Asians, Native Americans, LGBTQ, people with disabilities, veterans, and women.

CEO Action focuses on both companies and universities, with a President’s Circle and a university-focused corporate working group. Both are working to adapt the pledge to higher education by engaging faculty and staff, and discussing campus programming, including a CEO speaker series, recruiting events, and a “Check Your Blind Spots” mobile tour that helps students explore the concept of unconscious bias —everything from poor hiring techniques to how people decide who to sit next to in public spaces. “The mobile tour brings home the issue of diversity,” PwC’s Schwartz said.  “It’s a great immersive experience and we’re hoping to find a time to get it to Haas.”

Other universities that have signed the CEO Action pledge include Cornell, Duke, Penn State, Texas A&M, Ohio State, the University of Michigan, and Georgetown.

Harrison’s pledge builds on ongoing DEI initiatives at Haas. Last October, the school delivered an action plan that outlined specific ways to bolster enrollment of underrepresented minorities and to develop a more inclusive environment schoolwide. Efforts in the Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Action Plan included increasing  overall scholarship money for underrepresented minority students and adding a question on the MBA application to include a student’s experience in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

UC Berkeley launches joint master’s degree in business and engineering

| by Kim Girard

photo of Berkeley students holding a laptopThe Haas School of Business and College of Engineering have joined forces to launch a concurrent MBA/MEng degree program to equip innovative leaders with the skills to take on complex and technical challenges.

The new program, enrolling for fall 2020, will allow students with sufficient undergraduate technical training to earn both a Master of Business Administration and a Master of Engineering degree in just two years.

The MBA/MEng program is designed for early-career professionals who wish to take their careers to a higher level of leadership, whether at a major firm, a startup, or as an entrepreneur, said MBA/MEng Program Faculty Director Candace Yano, a professor with joint appointments at Haas and Berkeley Engineering.

“The program will prepare students to meet industry demands for graduates who are both business- and technology-savvy and can lead technical innovation efforts—a combination of skills needed in Silicon Valley and beyond,” she said.

Haas Dean Ann Harrison said the program will draw from the strength of both schools, allowing students to learn from some of the world’s top minds from a wide range of disciplines. Students will have access to both UC Berkeley’s rich intellectual resources and the Bay Area’s innovation ecosystem.

“With this exciting new program, we’re leaning into our Berkeley strength and uniting two of our top-ranked programs at the engineering and business schools to fill a need to educate leaders who are fluent in both worlds,” Harrison said.

Berkeley Engineering Dean Tsu-Jae King Liu said this kind of technical and business fluency is essential for driving innovation.

“Today’s business leaders increasingly need to understand and harness the transformative potential of engineered devices, systems, and processes,” she said. “This concurrent degree program is aligned with our college’s mission to train graduate students who not only have expertise in their respective engineering subfields, but who also have the skills to succeed as entrepreneurs and as leaders in industries where technological innovation offers a key competitive advantage.”

Graduates with advanced engineering and business skills are in high demand. Companies that have recently hired Berkeley Haas MBA graduates who also have a master’s degree in engineering include Google, Apple, Boston Consulting Group, Citibank, Eli Lilly, Genentech, KPMG, Marvell Semiconductor, and Microsoft. Their typical roles include product manager, principal architect, marketing analytics manager, senior consultant, and manager of strategy and operations.

The MBA/MEng program will launch with a cohort of 20 students and is expected to grow to 30 during the next few years. Applicants will be considered for admission to both departments by a combined committee (students accepted to only one of the two programs may enroll in that program).

The rigorous curriculum will include MBA courses in leadership, marketing, management, finance, data analysis, ethics, and macroeconomics, along with engineering courses in one of seven areas of concentration: Bioengineering, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences, Industrial Engineering & Operations Research, Materials Science & Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, or Nuclear Engineering. Students will also take courses in managing research and development, project management, and working in teams.

An integral part of the program is a second-year capstone project that asks students to solve real-world challenges for companies or nonprofit government organizations. Examples of these interdisciplinary projects include creating better solar and water reclamation opportunities for greener cities or completing the marketing analysis required to redesign a residential water filter for a manufacturer.

To be considered for the program, applicants must have at least two years of full-time work experience as well as sufficient undergraduate coursework to be successful in master’s level engineering classes. Depending on their intended field, that may include an engineering degree or a degree in physics or mathematics with coursework in computer programming. Applicants can submit either GMAT or GRE scores.

The new program was inspired by Berkeley’s undergraduate Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology Program (M.E.T.), launched in 2017 and aimed at teaching undergraduates the skills of business and technology in one four-year bachelor of science degree. Haas also has interdisciplinary dual degree programs with public health (MBA/MPH) and law (JD/MBA).

The concurrent degree program was launched with the support of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) in honor of its founder, Morris Chang.

Chou Hall earns third in trifecta of green building credentials

| by Kim Girard
Photo of the front of Chou Hall
Chou Hall is the country’s greenest academic building. Photo: Dan Williams

Connie & Kevin Chou Hall has earned the third in a trifecta of green building credentials: a WELL Certification recognizing its “strong commitment to supporting human health, well-being, and comfort.”

The certification comes on the heels of two others the building has received over the past year from Green Business Certification Inc. (GBSI). It achieved TRUE Zero Waste Certification at the highest possible level and LEED Platinum Certification for its architectural design, construction, and energy efficiency.

“From the start of the Chou Hall construction project, we focused on building a student-centric academic space that reflected our school’s unique culture and how we value sustainable impact,” said Courtney Chandler, senior assistant dean and chief operating & strategy officer of the Haas School. “Being the first academic building to be WELL Certified, and the greenest academic building in the country, exemplifies our Defining Leadership Principles in action.”

Photo of Cafe Think in Chou Hall
Cafe Think’s floor-to-ceiling windows connect the indoors to the outdoors. Photo: Jim Block

“It’s particularly rewarding to cap off the building certification journey with the last of these three certifications,” said Walter Hallanan, BS 72, who has managed the Chou Hall project as well as the school’s Master Plan Project. “We’re breaking new ground with Chou Hall. It’s a significant achievement that sets an example for the Berkeley campus, particularly with regard to the LEED and WELL certification.”

Attention to many details

WELL Certified spaces are designed to improve the overall health of the people who use the building, by addressing areas such as nutrition, fitness, mood, sleep patterns, and performance of the building occupants. Design details include everything from the solar panels that provide energy to the building to the fact that as much outside air as possible is funneled into the building’s interior.

Photo of students on the shairs in Chou Hall
Students descending stairs in Chou Hall get exercise and a view of the trees. Photo: Jim Block

The WELL Certified credential is the culmination of literally years of detailed planning and design. “There are hundreds of requirements you have to comply with,” Hallanan said.

Certification officials toured Chou Hall for performance verification site visits in December 2018 and June 2019 to get a sense of the building’s environment.

“The level of detail and thought that went into the design and construction of the space and flow throughout Chou Hall contribute to the overall feeling,” Chandler said. “It’s not an accident that when people come to Spieker Forum—our top floor event space with huge windows and amazing views—they often say it feels like they’re in a tree house.”

An innovative funding model

Another novel aspect of the building was its funding model that enabled greater efficiency and cost savings. A private nonprofit fund, the Partnership for Haas Preeminence, chaired by Ned Spieker, BS 66; Walter Hallanan, BS 72; and former Dean Rich Lyons, BS 82, raised the donations and managed design and construction in tandem before donating the completed building back to the university last year.

Photo of Chou Hall classroom.
The new Chou Hall classrooms and meeting spaces were part of the Haas Master Plan Project, led by Walter Hallanan, BS 72. Photo: Blake Marvin

Chou Hall is the core of the Haas Master Plan Project, which also included the new courtyard and the addition of cooling to Cheit Hall. The student-centered building includes classroom and meeting spaces, the state-of-the-art Spieker Forum event space, and a cafe at the courtyard level.

Chou Hall provided much-needed space at Haas, where enrollment has nearly doubled over the past 20 years.

It is named for Kevin Chou, BS 02, and his wife, Dr. Connie Chen, in recognition of their donation: the largest personal gift by an alum under the age of 40 in UC Berkeley’s history.

“I am proud of what we’ve accomplished,” Chandler said. “What I love hearing most is how the building makes people feel. That’s what people are going to remember.”

Photo of the interior of Chou Hall.
“What I love hearing most is how the building makes people feel. That’s what people are going to remember.” – Haas COO Courtney Chandler. Photo: Blake Marvin

EMBA’s Kirsten Berzon on the hard-won fight for marriage equality

| by Kim Girard
Kirsten Berzon, associate director of events and experiential learning for the Berkeley MBA for Executives Program (left), with her wife, Kathy, photographed in 2009 next to their SF Pride poster.

In the summer of 2009, Kirsten Berzon and her wife, Kathy, could be seen embracing everywhere around San Francisco. Larger-than-life pictures of the couple covered the sides of MUNI buses and shelters, reflecting San Francisco Pride’s “To Form A More Perfect Union” theme.

At that time, Berzon was a board member for Marriage Equality USA (MEUSA), an organization that advocated for civil marriage equality in every state and at the federal level. For nine years, she fought for the freedom to marry—until the Supreme Court in 2015 struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage, legalizing it in all fifty states, and requiring states to honor out-of-state same-sex marriage licenses.

We talked to Berzon, associate director of events and experiential learning for the Berkeley MBA for Executives Program, about growing up in Oakland and Berkeley, where her parents owned a well-known local cafe, her history of social justice activism, and weathering turbulent LBGT rights politics.

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Ames, Iowa. My mom was a professor in the English Department at Iowa State University. We moved to Oakland when I was four and a half, so I consider myself a California native.

Photo of Kirsten Berzon with her brother Ian and father during the mid-1980s.
Kirsten, (right) who grew up in Oakland and Berkeley, with her father and brother during the mid-1980s.

I actually grew up in Oakland and Berkeley, because my parents are divorced, so I spent half the week in each city.  In Berkeley our family is a little famous because my parents owned the Homemade Café, a breakfast/lunch greasy spoon. They opened in 1979 and it’s still going strong. They sold it in 2011.

Photo of Kirsten Berzon with her mom.
Kirsten (left) with her mom at her 2008 wedding.

You come from a family of social justice advocates. What was that like?

My dad went to Rutgers University in New Jersey  and was the president of the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an organization that did a lot of work against the Vietnam War in the ’60s. In addition to SDS, my mom was also heavily involved in the civil rights movement. I think that’s where it started. My whole life, my parents, and my aunt and uncle, my dad’s siblings, were very active, so any topic you can think of—the pro-choice movement, or the war in Iraq, LGBT rights—they’re out there. Since Trump got elected, I think they’re sort of reliving their activist days. I’ve heard my dad say things like, “I thought the ’60s were over. I can’t believe that we’re still fighting for these same issues.”

So how old were you when you came out?

I was 20. It was the summer between my junior and senior year in college. I’d never dated boys, wasn’t even remotely interested except for one sixth grade crush. Also, I didn’t have any interest in girls. When I went away to college, my freshman year I thought, “Okay, I guess I’m supposed to have a boyfriend.” So my roommate and I decided we were going to try and find boys in the dorm to be friends with as a starting point, and we did. And I still didn’t have any romantic interest in them. That kind of went nowhere, but my second year in college I met a woman in the dorm who became my best friend. I also fell in love with her. She was the first lesbian I knew who was my age.

Were there issues when you came out?

It was really hard when I came out to my mom and she said, “Well, you don’t know.” She knew that I was in love with my friend, but she thought that it was a phase, and that it was about that particular person and not about coming to terms with my sexuality.

So how did you finally convince your family?

We got into a lot of discussions and eventually my mom came around, but what I realized is that everyone in the family had to go through their own coming out process. It wasn’t just me. And that was hard to take. It was actually my stepmom, when I came out, who said, “Well, we knew that a long time ago.” And I asked, “Why didn’t you tell me?” While it wasn’t as smooth as I had hoped for, that was a blip on the radar I would say. They are the most loving and supportive family and I am so grateful. My mom and I have marched in the San Francisco Pride Parade multiple times with PFLAG, Parents and Friends of Lesbians & Gays, with people crying and screaming as we went by. It’s such a euphoric feeling.

Can you talk about why you got involved with Marriage Equality USA?

Marriage Equality USA was a very small volunteer driven organization that for many years had little or no paid staff. Our mission was to change hearts and minds by talking to people, one conversation at a time, about why marriage mattered. I believe that is what changed the tide so incredibly quickly on this issue. People realized that all we wanted were the same legal rights that any heterosexual married person had.

Kirsten thanked then Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom for his role in the fight for marriage equality at the Marriage Equality USA San Francisco Awards Reception in May 2013.
Kirsten thanked then Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, for his support of marriage equality at the Marriage Equality USA San Francisco Awards Reception in May 2013.

What do you remember about the day that the California Supreme Court granted the rights of marriage to same sex couples?

It was May 15, 2008. I remember that day very clearly. It was a few months before I started working at Haas. I remember sobbing at my computer, overcome with joy, and being totally distracted, thinking, “Oh my God, I’m supposed to be at work.” I read every email and article I could get my hands on and listened to the radio analysis of the decision. I couldn’t understand how the world could keep going like everything was normal, when my life and the lives of so many marriage equality activists like me had changed so dramatically with this victory.

My wife and I got married in August of 2008, along with 18,000 other couples in California, in what became known as the Prop 8 window.

But then Prop 8 passed in November 2008, a ballot measure that eliminated the rights of same sex couples to marry in California. What did you do?

That was a very, very dark time. You felt like you were just trying to live your life and yet there was just so much hate out there. I was working at Haas when Prop 8 passed. Obama had just won his first election, and I was elated. But Prop 8 had passed, and I was destroyed by that. Having those two emotions at the same time was really hard to reconcile.

Considering all that you’ve worked for, including the eventual Supreme Court decision to strike down all same sex marriage bans in 2015, how much does the current political environment worry you?

I’m incredibly nervous. We won marriage, which was huge and what we’d been fighting for for years, but you can still be fired for being gay in 26 states. Brian Silva, the former executive director of Marriage Equality USA, calls it “lived equality.” He’d say, “If you can get married to your same-sex partner on a Sunday, but bring a picture from your wedding into work on Monday and get fired, we have a lot of work left to do.” While we were all incredibly thrilled that we gained the freedom to marry, there are still so many LGBT civil rights battles yet to be won. I’m worried and I don’t think marriage equality is a given anymore. Just like I’m worried about Roe v. Wade, as a former reproductive rights activist. I don’t think either of those hard won rights are safe in the current climate.

Kirsten Berzon and her father at her wedding.
Kirsten and her father celebrate at her wedding.

 

Joe Castiglione, MBA 21, on coming out to his devout family

| by Kim Girard
right to left: Joe Castiglione and his partner, Seth, with Joe's parents on vacation in Key West.
(right to left): Joe Castiglione and his partner, Seth, with Joe’s parents on vacation in Key West.

In honor of Pride Month, we’re running a series of profiles and Q&As with members of the LGBTQ community at Haas. Follow the series throughout June.

In this interview, Evening & Weekend MBA student Joe Castiglione, a manager of strategic initiatives at healthcare accreditation  organization NCQA, talks about coming out to his devoutly Baptist family at age 22, how he found pride in the close-knit gay community in Washington D.C., and being out openly at Haas.

Where did you grow up? I grew up in a few different places around Texas, all rural and suburban, but we moved around a lot. Lived a bit outside of Houston and I went to high school outside of Fort Worth, in a small town called Burleson. Kelly Clarkson, our hometown hero, went to our high school — the one claim to fame that we have! I went to college at UT in Austin, moving to Washington D.C. about 48 hours after I graduated. I spent six years in D.C. working in health policy before moving to the Bay Area for Haas.

Joe as a baby with his dad.
Joe Castiglione, who grew up in the Baptist church in Texas, celebrating a birthday with his dad.

What was your experience growing up?

I come from a devoutly religious family. I went to Baptist church every Sunday, church on Wednesdays, Youth Group on Wednesdays, the whole kit and caboodle. We even went for a brief period to a mega-church in Houston called Lakewood, where Joel Osteen is the pastor. I didn’t really have much of a safe environment where I could explore my queer identity until much later in life.

When did you first think that you might be gay?

I think the first time I knew something was when I was watching “Saved by the Bell” with my older sister, and I was like way more interested in the cute blond guy Zack Morris than in Kelly Kapowski, the cutest brunette of the 90s. I didn’t have any access to LGBTQ people or media in small-town Texas, so it was a while before I recognized what my interest in Zack Morris was all about.

So when did you finally come out?

I came out in 2012. I was 22, and it was shortly after moving to D.C. Despite my fear of coming out, and really every effort that I put forward to fight coming out, being in D.C. just yanked the gay right out of me. There’s such an amazingly vibrant queer community in D.C., and I am forever indebted to the queer community there for helping me discover a sense of self-love and pride in being a part of that community.

Joe Castiglione, MBA 21, (right) with his boyfriend, Seth, who helped Joe's father open up to their relationship.
Joe Castiglione, MBA 21, (right) with his boyfriend, Seth, who helped Joe’s father open up to their relationship.

How did your family take the news?

When I came out to my mom, she secretly told everyone in my family, really depriving me of what I think is for many queer folks a watershed moment in our lives. The rest of my family did struggle with it a lot at first as well. There was the “gay people go to Hell” thing, and the “gay people can’t have children” thing. The hardest was my dad, who took a couple of years to really come around. He started to open up in 2015 when I began dating my partner who I’m still with today. It was almost immediate as my partner is similar to my dad in some ways and has many of the personal qualities that he values. Fortunately, since 2012, we’ve come a super long way as family and today my mom is my fiercest supporter and a huge ally for the entire LGBTQ community. Today she’s one of the “Free Mom Hugs” women at Dallas Pride!

Joe during WeLaunch orientation has Haas.
“Being out at Haas was really my first opportunity to be openly queer in a classroom setting.” – Joe Castiglione, MBA 21.

Did your experience as a Q-identified person change at all when you came to Haas?

Being out at Haas was really my first opportunity to be openly queer in a classroom setting. I’ve discovered a new sense of pride and confidence in my queer identity by bringing that perspective into a classroom on things like management and leadership. It’s been a real pleasure to challenge myself to be more thoughtful and more nuanced in the way that I articulate my experience as a queer person in the workplace.

Do those experiences translate into the workplace?

Management and leadership are the big areas where this comes up at work—when we’re talking about how to interact with people, how to manage people individually, and manage to their expectations and things like that. What was so immediately clear to me is that Haas prides itself on intentionally creating environments that cultivate diversity, particularly in leadership. That’s a philosophy that I’ve really taken on since coming here–this desire to push that mission forward.

What’s a challenge that you’ve lived through that others who aren’t Q-identified might not be aware of?

For a long time, I was closeted and struggled with self love, but coming out and embracing my queer identity has been the biggest gift I could ever give myself. People who aren’t Q-identified may not see that, although I think it’s something everyone can identify with. It may sound cliché but because of this self love that I’ve found, I’m on this journey of learning how to treat people as you would treat yourself—considering who they are, and what that means for the way that you interact with them, and the way that they interact with the world.

Haas feeds growing appetite for the business of sustainable food

| by Kim Girard
(left to right) Will Rosenzweig, who launched the Sustainable Food Initiative at Haas, with Aaron Hall, a PhD student in the Materials Science & Engineering Program, and Jessica Heiges, a PhD candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, & Management.
(left to right) Will Rosenzweig, who launched the Sustainable Food Initiative at Haas, with students who took his Food Innovation Studio course: Aaron Hall, a PhD student in the Materials Science & Engineering Program and Jessica Heiges, a PhD candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, & Management. Photo: Jim Block

After working in the dairy industry in Illinois for six years, John Monaghan, MBA 20, arrived at Berkeley Haas on a mission to dive deeper into the business of food.

He didn’t waste any time. In his first year, Monaghan became co-president of the student-run Food@Haas, was nominated to the student advisory board for the Berkeley Haas Center for Responsible Business, and snagged a summer internship at Danone in New York, where he’ll be supporting marketing of the Oikos yogurt brand. He even shared lunch with Alice Waters at her restaurant Chez Panisse, after he worked as a graduate student reader during her Edible Education 101 course. “She hosted us as a thank-you for the semester,” he said.

Alice Waters with John Monaghan, MBA 20
Alice Waters with John Monaghan, MBA 20

Like many of the 20 full-time MBA students who have landed coveted internships and jobs this year in the food and beverage industry—at companies ranging from Clif Bar to Kraft— Monaghan is benefiting from the Sustainable Food Initiative at Haas. The umbrella effort, launched in April 2018 by the Center for Responsible Business, combines food-focused courses, cutting-edge research, entrepreneurship training, events with food industry luminaries, and key industry partnerships.

A food-focused tribe

The initiative both reflects and cultivates a growing interest in the food business at Haas and Berkeley. The number of students landing internships and full-time jobs in the food and beverage industry has doubled over the past three years, and the number of food-related startups—from 2019 MBA grad Somiran Gupta’s nearfarms, an online marketplace that connects small, local farmers directly with consumers, to Tannor’s Tea, founded by Samantha Tannor, MBA 20, whose company sells sugar-free matcha concentrate—is increasing every year.

“We’ve attracted a tribe of people who are food-focused,” says Doug Massa, a corporate relationship manager with the Berkeley Haas Career Management Group. “They want to learn about branding and marketing, but they also want to learn about opportunities in the food supply chain, business operations, and the role of venture capital in food.”

Connecting across Berkeley

Will Rosenzweig, faculty co-chair with the Berkeley Haas Center for Responsible Business (CRB) and a pioneer of the sustainable food movement at Berkeley, is leading the Sustainable Food Initiative. The founder of the Republic of Tea, Rosenzweig taught Haas’ first class on social entrepreneurship 20 years ago—and went on to mentor and invest in successful Haas startups including Revolution Foods, co-founded by Kristin Groos Richmond and Kirsten Saenz Tobey, both MBA 06, to make healthier cafeteria food for kids.

Working with CRB’s program manager Emily Pellisier, Rosenzweig is now figuring out how Haas expertise in entrepreneurship and business aligns with sustainability efforts across the Berkeley campus. They’re reaching out to innovative programs like the Berkeley Food Institute and the Alternative Meat Lab at the UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

“With the riches we have at Berkeley, one of my jobs is to is to remove some of the boundaries between the disciplines, and Haas has been really supportive of that,” Rosenzweig said. “We’re getting other really smart people involved in solving these sustainability problems.”

Watch an “Edible Education 101” session with chef and cookbook author Samin Nosrat and community organizer Shakirah Simley, discussing diversity and inclusion in the food industry.

At the initiative’s core is “Edible Education 101,” which Rosenzweig teaches with Waters, who co-founded the class with author Michael Pollan in 2011. The undergraduate course brings scientists, CEOs, community activists, and chefs to Haas to talk about the future of food, from seeds to soil health to increasing access to quality food for all. Guests have included chef Samin Nosrat (of the popular Netflix docu-series based on her cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat), who spoke last semester on diversity and inclusion in the food industry, to Danny Meyer, founder of Shake Shack and CEO of Union Square Hospitality Group, who addressed the future of restaurant careers.

Students in Will Rosenzweig's Food Innovation Studio
Students in Will Rosenzweig’s Food Innovation Studio course.

Victoria Williams-Ononye, MBA 19, the graduate student instructor for the “Edible Education” course, said about 20 of her MBA peers attended the classes. “There’s a core group of people who come to Haas knowing they’re passionate about food,” said Williams-Ononye, who has accepted a job working in Breakthrough Innovation at Kraft in Chicago.

Monaghan called the caliber of “Edible Education” guest speakers “a hidden gem of this entire university.”

The sky’s the limit

Meanwhile, the Food Innovation Studio, Rosenzweig’s two-unit course which uses the Lean LaunchPad method to encourage students in food entrepreneurship, dives deeply into topics such as the rise of regenerative agriculture, sustainable alternatives to single-use packaging, the evolution of plant-based proteins, food system sustainability, and disruptive food delivery models.

While the majority of the students enrolled last semester were from the MBA program, the course draws students from across Berkeley, including Aaron Hall, a PhD student in the Materials Science & Engineering Program who is developing a richer-tasting plant-based fat substitute, and Jessica Heiges, a PhD candidate in Environmental Science, Policy, & Management, who co-founded RePeel, a reusable-food-container service for universities.

Beyond classes, the Sustainable Food Initiative serves as an umbrella for new research, including the recent case, “Reversing Climate Change Through Sustainable Food: Patagonia Provisions Attempts to Scale a ‘Big Wall’.” It’s also a home for partnerships with companies like Patagonia Provisions and General Mills’ Natural and Organics Operating Unit, which includes Annie’s Homegrown, EPIC, Cascadian Farm Organic, and Muir Glen brands. Both companies are now on the CRB advisory board, where they often find time to collaborate with each other, as well as Haas, said Robert Strand, executive director of the Center for Responsible Business.

“The sky’s the limit with this initiative,” Strand said. “We want to be a strong partner in the global conversation on food and bring the world to California and our ideas to the world.”

MBA grads: Be brave, embrace your power to change the world

| by Kim Girard

Berkeley Haas MBA students in the Class of 2019 were urged to be brave and embrace their power to make significant contributions to improve the world at Friday’s commencement.

The commencement was held under sunny skies at the Greek Theatre, where Dean Ann Harrison welcomed parents, friends, and family of evening & weekend MBA and full-time MBA students. “All of you have been transformed in some profound way. That is, after all, why you came here,” she told them.

Watch the video of 2019 MBA commencement.

Commencement speaker Patrick Awuah, MBA 99 and founder of Ashesi University in Ghana, told graduates the story of how he arrived at Berkeley Haas in his early 30s, with a new baby, having quit his job at Microsoft. He had a singular goal to prepare himself to start a successful university, and he built his plan for Ashesi during his entire time at Haas.

Patrick Awuah, 2019 MBA commencement speaker
“At Ashesi (University) today I see echoes of Berkeley.” – Patrick Awuah, MBA 99 and 2019 MBA commencement speaker. (Photo: Noah Berger)

“Ashesi started here, and I recognize the fact that there are not many places where this could have happened,” said Awuah, whose school has grown from 30 to 1,000 students. “We all had hope that it was going to be a remarkable institution, but it has exceeded even our loftiest dreams…At Ashesi today I see echoes of Berkeley: In our classrooms and the curriculum that we teach and the values we share; in the open embrace of equitable access to the opportunity for learning and development. I see echoes of Berkeley in how our community works and in our corporate culture. I see echoes of Berkeley in Ashesi’s people and leadership.”

Full-time MBA student speaker Bree Jenkins, who is co-founding the Hayward Collegiate Charter School, shared a personal story of feeling powerless as a teen.

FTMBA student speaker Bree Jenkins
FTMBA student speaker Bree Jenkins (Photo: Noah Berger)

“Age 15, days before my birthday, on a bitter December night, my mom leaves for a tour in Iraq. I honestly don’t know if she will ever come back. When this feeling of powerlessness grabs hold of you, it is usually dark. And you’re typically alone. Your whole body clenches. Palms sweaty. There’s a tightening of your stomach as you realize there is nothing you can do.”

Jenkins said the transformation from powerlessness to power has many faces. “As a new graduate of the Haas School of Business, it has your (face),” she said. “And as a black woman who represents just 1% of her class, yet has the privilege of speaking on your behalf, it has mine. Right now, we have power. And with this power, we share an incredible responsibility to this world and to one another.”

EWMBA student speaker Nancy Hoque (Photo: Noah Berger)

Calling out classmates by name, Nancy Hoque, student speaker for the Evening & Weekend MBA Program, addressed why they were brave for different reasons: for risking it all in changing a career, for joining her in protesting the immigration ban at the San Francisco Airport, for traveling across the world to help Syrian refugees, and for organizing female students to wear white on their commencement caps to symbolize the strength and unity of women who completed the program.

“Yes, absolutely they were all brave, because bravery entails taking a chance,” she said. “Grabbing onto that door which is cracked open and, regardless of the obstacles and unknowns, walking through it.”

MBA grad wtih flowers around his neck
Evan Krokowski, who graduated from the evening & weekend program, celebrates. Photo: Noah Berger.

Commencement Awards

Full-Time MBA Program

Student speaker Bree Jenkins (center) surrounded by the Defining Leadership Principles award winners
FTMBA student speaker Bree Jenkins (center) surrounded by the Defining Leadership Principles award winners. (Photo: Noah Berger)

Academic Achievement Award: Somiran Gupta

Full-Time MBA Defining Leadership Principle Awards:

Question the Status Quo: Tam Emerson; Confidence without Attitude: Somiran Gupta; Students Always: Mariana Lanzas Goded; Beyond Yourself: Matthew Freeman Hines; The Berkeley Leader Award: Bosun Adebaki

The Earl F. Cheit Award for Excellence in Teaching: Adair Morse

Cheit Award for Graduate Student Instructor: Margaret Fong

 

Evening & Weekend MBA Program

Evening & Weekend Program Defining Leadership Principles award winners.
Evening & Weekend Program Defining Leadership Principles award winners: Tess Peppers, Eppa Rixey, Michael Toomey, and Melanie Akwule.

Academic Achievement Award: Eppa Rixey

Defining Leadership Principles awards:

Question the Status Quo: Tess Peppers; Confidence Without Attitude: Aimee Bailey; Students Always: Eppa Rixey; Beyond Yourself: Michael Toomey; The Berkeley Leader Award: Melanie Akwule

The Earl F. Cheit Awards for Excellence in Teaching: Prof. Ross Levine (for weekend program) and Assoc. Prof. Yaniv Konchitchki (for evening program)

Graduate Student Instructor: Zachary Olson for the Data & Decisions course

 

 

EMBA students’ Alabama road trip: Reflections on racial injustice

| by Kim Girard

A trip to Montgomery and Selma, Alabama, over Memorial Day weekend led Lisa Rawlings, EMBA 19, to redefine courage.

“Putting myself in my grandparents’ shoes, I realized that courage was not always resistance, but sometimes it was simply endurance, which often required unthinkable compromises to their dignity to save their lives and those of their loved ones,” said Rawlings, whose African American grandmother was born in Alabama and left for Memphis as a teenager.

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Rawlings was among a group of six students in the MBA for Executives program who traveled to Alabama to connect the history of racial injustice in America to the present day. Rawlings was joined by Adam Rosenzweig, John Gribowich, a priest who made the same trip last year, Alexei Greig, Claire Veuthey, and Suprita Makh, all EMBA 19.

In Montgomery, the group visited the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also called the lynching memorial, which opened in 2018 and was built by the the non-profit Equal Justice Initiative. They toured the City of Saint Jude Parish and the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church, the first church where Martin Luther King Jr. served as pastor. After visiting the Lowndes Interpretive Center (in 1965, 80% of residents in Lowndes were African-American and not a single one was registered to vote), they walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, the scene of the stand-off between the marchers for voting rights and law enforcement on Bloody Sunday in 1965.

(All photos by John Gribowich and Adam Rosenzweig)

 

 

Full-time MBA program ranked #6 globally by América Economia

| by Kim Girard

The Full-time Berkeley Haas MBA program placed sixth in the world in the MBA Global 2019 RAmerica Economia MBA rankinganking by América Economia, a Latin American business magazine. The annual ranking includes the best Latin American and worldwide business schools for Latin American students.

Among the top 10 in this year’s ranking, four of the MBA programs are American: Haas, Stanford, Harvard, and Yale.

América Economia ranked the MBA programs based on performance in five areas: multicultural and diversity experience (22.5 percent weight); network potential for Latin Americans (12.5 percent weight); selectivity (27.5 percent weight); focus on innovation (10 percent); and international positioning, which refers to how the programs are ranked in The Economist, The Financial Times, and the QS MBA Rankings (27.5 percent).

For more information on the Spanish-language ranking, visit the website.

Kellie McElhaney named to “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business” list

| by Kim Girard
Kellie McElhaney in classroom teaching.
Kellie McElhaney teaches students to be “equity fluent leaders.”

Kellie McElhaney, distinguished teaching fellow and founding executive director of the Center for Equity, Gender, & Leadership at Berkeley Haas, has been named among the “Most Influential Women in Bay Area Business” by the San Francisco Business Times.

McElhaney was featured among more than 100 Bay Area women leaders in real estate, law, tech, finance, health care, and education, among other industries. The women chosen all share a passion for what they do and are leaders in their organizations and their communities, according to the SF Business Times.

McElhaney joined Berkeley Haas in 2002 as an adjunct professor and founded the Center for Responsible Business, serving as its executive director. In 2008, The Financial Times rated Haas #1 in the world for corporate social responsibility.

Over the years, McElhaney has been interviewed as an expert on gender equity and inclusiveness, women in business leadership, the gender pay gap, and #MeToo by media outlets ranging from Bloomberg and The Washington Post to NPR and Forbes.

McElhaney, who earned a PhD from the University of Michigan, told the SF Business Times that her biggest professional accomplishment was being dubbed “chief inspiration officer” by her MBA students. She said she’s also proud of teaching more than 1,000 Berkeley students a year to be “equity fluent leaders,” a term she uses to describe leaders who understand inclusiveness and how to lead people from all gender and ethnic backgrounds. McElhaney is currently teaching “The Value of Equity Fluent Leadership” across all degree programs.

She said the biggest challenge of her career was finding her voice to stand up to gender discrimination and harassment. “I’ve learned that I need to practice what I teach, and that by speaking up, I help countless women, not just myself.”

Her sister, Mary Lynne, is her personal hero, she said. A triathlete who weathered difficult professional and personal circumstances after she came out, her sister was able to reclaim “her authentic self,” McElhaney said.

“She’s a fearless big sis crusader for me and always has my back,” she said.

McElhaney, the mother of two college-age daughters, serves on the board of Sierra Global Management LLC and is involved in the community as a board member of the national nonprofit Empower Her Network. She also serves on the gender equity committee for the California Athletics Board.