Student Profile: Management Challenge

Greg Rawson '11
Summer Internship: McKinsey
Clubs: Education, Board Service, SOM Outreach

I worked in education before coming to SOM, first as a third-grade teacher, then a program director for Teach for America.
 
Then I took a job with a nonprofit consulting firm that worked in education called Education Resource Strategies. No matter where we went, I saw the challenges in how to build more than individual high-performing schools. There was no uniformly high-performing district. I came to believe that a major reason for this came down to incentives and management. Public school districts are historically siloed, non-innovative, and relatively static institutions. To be truly successful we need to push the good ideas throughout a district, and since I see this as fundamentally a management challenge, I decided to go to business school. SOM was an obvious choice.

SOM has a very strong education community. Each year, the Education Club sponsors a conference, which brings some of the top leaders in education to New Haven to discuss the latest and most pressing issues facing teachers, administrators, policy makers. But just as important to me is the diversity of thought at SOM. I'd experienced several different roles in education but hadn’t really explored my boundaries. I wanted a school where students were interested in a wide variety of sectors. SOM draws people from all spheres and I was interested in seeing how this diversity interacts. The same principles can be seen in the integrated curriculum. Life is complicated and messy, and as an educator I found it really attractive to find a school where people are thinking about the best way to teach the skills needed to be successful in the real world.

I would be wasting my time if I didn't come here with an open mind. I want to try different things, to test myself and my assumptions. I'm working for McKinsey this summer. The talent there is really impressive and I’m looking forward to learning from them. It will be really good for me not just to think about reform, but to carry it out. In consulting, you draw up actual plans, which clients then implement. You get to test your ideas, see what works, and then modify them. In a way it’s a lot like SOM. You come here for two years and acquire the skills necessary to be successful in the world. But you also learn how to look at problems in new ways and attack them with an eye for more than just benefitting your shareholders. This isn't just a better approach, it's a smarter one.

Interviewed on March 30, 2010