Student Profile: Education Reform

Fawzia Ahmed '07
Executive committee, Net Impact Club

I'm doing exactly what I described in my application essay.

As an undergrad, I studied economics, and after graduating, I went to work for an economic consulting firm doing analysis for antitrust cases. But I wanted to have more of an impact. I'd been a tutor at an inner city school in Boston, and I had been thinking about education reform. I thought that the problem in urban schools wasn't just inputs — the students and the teachers — it was organizational problems and issues of management. So when I applied to SOM, I said that I wanted to develop broader management skills to be able to work in the education sector, for a charter school or school district.

And that’s what I’m doing. I did an internship at Achievement First, a charter school management organization in New Haven, and after graduation I’m going back as director of special projects. The organization centralizes functions such as recruiting and curriculum for its schools and provides the overarching vision for the network.

The job really grew out of a connection I made through Sharon Oster. Professor Oster put me in contact with Achievement First and I worked on a project for them in the spring semester of my first year, putting together financial projections under different scenarios of growth expansion. They kept me on for the summer and made it pretty clear early on that they wanted to make a role for me at the organization.

I'd never worked for a nonprofit before. I had these visions that nonprofits were incredibly inefficient and bureaucratic. But, instead, it was incredibly entrepreneurial, with the type of people who could run Fortune 500 companies.

While I was working at Achievement First last summer I got an email from Professor Oster. She was looking for ideas for cases for the new case research department, and she thought that Achievement First would make a great candidate. I ended up working with Jaan Elias, the director of the case research department, to develop a case about the organization’s expansion strategy. There was a difference of opinion between the leadership and the primary funder on the direction the organization should take, and I thought this would be an interesting jumping-off point for examining some broader issues.

That case was used in the Integrated Leadership Perspectives class, which is part of the new core curriculum. It’s a great example of why cases are invaluable. They are a way of accelerating students' experience by giving them more contact with a lot of the muddy issues that organizations face. There's not always a clear answer.

Interviewed on April 25, 2007.