I worked at Goldman Sachs, where I covered foreign exchange products, credit and fixed-income derivatives, and then mortgage products. I really wanted to get into the energy side of the business, but I wasn’t acquiring the broad set of skills I’d need.

Yale SOM has helped me acquire these skills. I’ve taken courses on macroeconomics, corporate financing, strategy, and energy markets. One of the things I love about the school is that if I come across any courses outside SOM I’m interested in, I can take them. There are energy courses at the Law School and the Forestry School that have helped me to approach the subject from new and interesting directions. I’m even taking a course at the Divinity School. And last fall, I studied abroad at Tsinghua University in China.

One of the things that surprised me the most here is how much you learn from your fellow students. There’s this great energy that comes from being among so many impressive people, who bring such diversity of experiences. I’m a finance guy, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about finance. I look at things differently than an entrepreneur or someone from marketing or consulting or HR.

I did my summer internship at Goldman, in the Financial Institutions Group. It was a chance to come back and test what I’d learned at Yale. I could see day to day just how much I had broadened my horizons. SOM had taught me not just specific skills, but to approach problems in a truly holistic manner.

Tomer Cohen ’11

Participant, International Exchange Program,
Tsinghua University, Beijing
post-MBA position: Goldman Sachs

I loved working in my study groups, even the ones that were assigned, because we approached everything with the goal of learning. I think the collaborative approach here helps you go beyond just writing down the correct answer; you’re working together to deepen your understanding of issues. That’s the point. You’re going to go out in the world and use this information, and you’re going to have to work effectively in teams.

The people who are attracted to Yale SOM have great intellectual curiosity. They’re not afraid to take a different path to solve a problem or to explore something in a new way. At the same time, I think that we are really passionate about what we’re doing. And it comes out not only in the way we work in our classroom setting, but in the way we work with student clubs and all the initiatives we take on.

As co-leader of the Women in Management club, my job is to try to foster a community that respects what unifies us—we are all women—but also respects the fact that we’re different. Just because we’re women doesn’t mean that we’re the same kind of person. And it’s really fun to try to create opportunities for people to come together and really get to know each other as people, and to build a foundation for how we’re going to continue to support and motivate each other once we leave here. I’m really excited to see what my classmates are going to be doing five and ten years from now.

Anthea Tjuanakis ’11

Co-leader, Women in Management Club; Leader, Consulting Club
Post-MBA position: Boston Consulting Group

My work is at the boundary of economics and sociology. The largest stream of my research is about economic geography and, in particular, how social networks affect the productivity of regions. I’ve been working on a very large project looking at how venture capital in a region affects entrepreneurship and the growth of the region.

We find that having more venture capital seems to be important to stimulating entrepreneurship and to the economic vitality of the region. But we also find some interesting contingencies—for example, venture capital is far more effective in generating economic returns in states that do not enforce non-compete agreements. That’s probably because both entrepreneurs and potential employees aren’t locked up in non-compete agreements with their former employers.

I also teach an elective class on venture capital. It’s taught from the point of view of the venture capitalist, but it’s also relevant to someone who might want to start a business.

One of the class exercises is a negotiation where some students are the management and other students are the venture capitalists. The students realize that it’s very hard to reach an agreement when there’s so much uncertainty—even if they have just slightly different beliefs about the prospects for the business.

For the final project in the course, we partner with Yale’s Office of Cooperative Research and the students look at actual technology coming out of Yale’s labs to try to assess whether it is something that a venture capitalist might invest in. It’s useful for both sides. OCR gets some information about which of these projects they should pay more attention to, and the students get some experience in assessing an actual potential investment.

Olav Sorenson

Professor of Organizational Behavior

I’m involved with a lot of clubs at Yale SOM, but I’m most active in three: Women in Management, the Black Business Alliance, and a new club, the Business of Sports Club.

The Business of Sports Club isn’t technically a club yet. We’re still going through the application process. But that’s something that I’m very passionate about. It’s great to be in a community where people want you to be passionate about your niche and help you find success in that area. It’s a small community, but people are constantly pushing one another to meet their goals.

I got interested in a career in sports when I was teaching at a private school in Jordan and I was promoted to be athletic director. After I came back to the United States, I got a master’s in sports management, but I realized that I still needed traditional business skills for the career that I was imagining.

I came to SOM with lofty goals. But, if anything, I’ve actually expanded them since I’ve been here. This summer I’m doing an internship in brand management with Procter & Gamble, and I’m also spending a month in Nigeria, where my family is from, working with Hope 4 Girls Africa, a nonprofit focused on youth development for young girls through basketball. I’ll be working on a strategic plan to develop their fundraising channels and make their business model more sustainable. I’m excited about my career, but it’s not just about my career: it’s about all the pieces of my life and how I can bridge them together. I wasn’t thinking on that scale before I came to SOM.

Sandra Idehen ’12

Internship: Procter & Gamble
Co-leader, Sports Club

I was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and grew up in Miami. After college, I lived in Buenos Aires, where I got a master’s in international economic relations, and then worked for Bloomberg in New York City and São Paulo. I visited clients in Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador, and Venezuela, and had the chance to do some business development. I discovered that I got a thrill out of building a product and working on my own project. That was a big motivation for me to go to business school.

I was applying from Brazil, which meant that I had limited time to visit schools, so it was easy to get overwhelmed by what all the different schools had to offer. Then I came to Yale SOM. I sat in on Sourcing and Managing Funds, and two professors with very different backgrounds and different focuses were teaching together and presenting a more complete understanding of that aspect of the curriculum. That made sense to me.

I live in downtown New Haven. I ride my bike to class every day, and I get to ride through the beautiful gothic architecture of the Yale campus. Last winter, I biked in the snow, even though I’m from Miami.

When I lived in New York, I loved going out to theater, to restaurants, but it always ended up being a complicated, expensive endeavor. Here it’s just handed to you. I have a season pass to the Yale Repertory Theatre. The Yale Philharmonic Orchestra is free. The Yale Art Gallery is a block and a half from my apartment. I like to go there after studying and just roam around this world-class museum.

Alejandro Gomez ’12

Pre-SOM Employer: Bloomberg
Internship: Mark Ventures, Buenos Aires

I teach a class called Capital Markets, which is about the whole range of markets where financial securities, including derivatives, are traded—among banks, between banks and institutional investors. So it’s basically about how the modern financial system works. Anybody who is going to do something in finance—working at a financial firm, a commercial bank, a hedge fund, a corporate treasury department—would be a candidate for this course.

One element of the course is to teach students how to think clearly about finance, and that involves learning a bunch of tools. Another aspect, though, is to understand that not everything you see in the world was always there—that people innovated and came up with new ideas. And those ideas are balanced with some practical, hands-on work: cases, homework, reading real-world documents.

One thing I like about Yale SOM is that the class sizes are small enough that the students can come and talk to you. They’re interested in lots of things—they come and talk about the financial crisis or other current events, or they’re looking for career advice. I pretty much don’t help them with the homework, though. I tell them, the homework may seem very hard to you, but I know you can do it because generations before you have done it.

Learning is not easy. You have to work. At the beginning of the semester, I say, "I’m going to work hard in this course, and I expect you to work hard in this course. And if we both work hard, we will get somewhere."

Gary B. Gorton

Frederick Frank Class of 1954 Professor of Management and Finance

I worked for Human Rights First, focusing on fundraising and event planning. I also volunteered at a number of places, mostly working on art projects with kids in juvenile detention centers and schools in Brooklyn and the Bronx. I really enjoyed this work, and wanted to find a graduate program that would allow me to use the arts as a way to approach social change. I got a master’s in education but also saw the benefit of an MBA. I view the education degree as a way to understand what I want to do and the MBA as how to implement it.

When I interviewed at other MBA programs, people didn’t understand why I wanted to go to business school. Not only did people at Yale get it, my interviewer said, “You should talk to this person and this person.” The school has the resources to help me achieve my goals.

I’ve loved all the opportunities I’ve had at Yale. I’ve been a leader of the Education Club and SOM’s chapter of Net Impact, which has allowed me to hone my leadership skills. And I participated in the Global Social Entrepreneurship course, where we worked for months with an organization trying to make rural villages in India self-sustaining by creating village-based outsourcing centers where villagers can get jobs. We spent a week on the ground, and it was really rewarding to balance the theory we learn in the classroom with a client-focused project with real-world implications.

Now I know I can go into an organization and really make a difference, and ultimately make it much more effective.

Jamila Amarshi ’11

Co-leader, Education Club
Post-MBA Position: level playing field institute

In a strategy course at Yale SOM, we’re thinking about the most fundamental decisions that firms make—whether to change a price, invest in new capacity, or enter a new line of business. What most students don’t realize until they get here is how much the discipline of science—economics, in particular—can inform those decisions. There are organizing, underlying principles that you can bring to bear on addressing these questions. For instance, understanding the economics of your competitors helps you predict how they will respond to your actions.

In my Technology Strategy course, we focus more closely on the strategic issues that arise in any kind of high-technology industry—intellectual property, organizing the R & D enterprise, antitrust issues, standards and compatibility. This is a fascinating area.

Look at the competition with e-readers right now. The technology could be revolutionary. There’s an interesting set of questions about how people are going to consume content in the future, and what that means for all the companies in this space. But I’m also very interested in the contracts that Amazon and Apple have entered into with content providers. There you see some interesting pricing issues that you could see in any industry. How a new technology changes what all of the players in the marketplace bring to the bargaining table is a classic strategy question.

In my classes here at SOM, I’ve had students from the Graduate School, students from Forestry, students from Drama, students from the Law School, undergraduates. We get a lot of perspectives in the classroom. On top of that, we always have students with experience in different parts of the various technology industries who know things that I don’t. I’ve found that extremely valuable.

Judith A. Chevalier

William S. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Economics

I’m getting a joint degree in medicine and business, and if you knew me, the combination would make perfect sense. I emigrated from Japan as a child. My family didn’t know the language or culture and our pediatrician was so much more than a doctor to us. He really planted a seed within me of the value of being a doctor. My family still has factories in Asia—they manufacture wire and cables—so I’ve always been interested in business.

Particularly with healthcare reform, it’s more important than ever that people in healthcare understand how to connect the business and clinical aspects of medicine to improve healthcare delivery. I also really liked the idea of meeting people outside of medicine. Yale SOM is so diverse that I knew I’d learn a ton just from my fellow students.

The Healthcare and Life Sciences Club is an amazing resource here. It’s a collaboration across Yale, with students not just from SOM, but the School of Medicine, Public Health, and Nursing. We put on an annual conference and this year I co-chaired it. Each year, more than 400 people attend. We have a $60,000 budget, much of which we raise ourselves. We handle logistics, speakers, marketing, running a board of outside advisors, and managing a large and diverse team of students.

One of the reasons I came to SOM was to get this kind of leadership experience. It pushes you outside your comfort zone and forces you to really use all the skills you’re learning in the classroom.

Hiromi Yoshida ’11

co-leader, healthcare and life sciences club
post-mba position: seattle children’s hospital

I have a background in mechanical engineering. Before I came to SOM, I worked as a consultant to clean energy startups. At one point, I had to decide between two projects: One client wanted me to build a prototype for a particular drill, a very engineering-heavy project; another client had asked me to run a business model analysis on a thermal battery that they wanted to deploy to telecom towers in India. I decided that I wanted to work with the battery and learn about a new business model. And I decided to get an MBA.

One of the great aspects of being at Yale is that I’ve been able to engage with people throughout the university. Through the Office of Cooperative Research, I connected with the engineering department and learned about the technologies that Yale’s labs are ready to monetize—for example, I worked with some magnetic solder research, which will be a part of the next transformation in mobile devices.

I also spent my first semester developing the business skills I needed for my consulting interviews, in class and in the Consulting Club. The club started by doing very simple market-sizing questions: how many golf balls would fit in an airplane? Then we read one of the leading books about case interviewing, and once we got some intuitive understanding of the first few points, they brought in the author to help teach the rest of it, which is amazing. And then they brought in an ex-McKinsey interviewer to teach us a little more about structure and casing. So they gave us an incredibly solid foundation from which we then built.

Jason Harp ’12

Co-leader, Hockey Club
Internship: Bain & Company

This year I’ll be teaching the microeconomics course for all first-year students. It won’t be a typical econ course. It’s designed to integrate with the rest of the core curriculum, so the course must do more than just give students a toolbox. It’s about developing a way of thinking and approaching problems, to prepare them for the wide array of issues they will confront during their two years here and beyond.

I also bring some of my own experiences into the classroom. I have consulted for numerous corporations over the years. But I also own a business. It’s called Mighty Good Coffee and it’s a café/roaster in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I don’t run it on a day-to-day basis, but I do try out some ideas from economics on it. One of the first lessons I’ll teach is the concept of elasticity. How does demand change with price? At my business, I consciously move the price around to test this.

I am also the director of the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs. This is a new entity at Yale, and it essentially exists to draw people together from across the university to confront the key issues facing the globe today. It’s cross-school and cross-disciplinary, and we’ve already had many Yale SOM students take advantage of our offerings. These include classes in leadership, taught by General Stanley McChrystal; on the rise of China, by Stephen Roach, the former head of Morgan Stanley Asia; and on India, by Rakesh Mohan, the former deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India. The opportunity for business students to further broaden their education in key ways is unprecedented. No other school can do what Yale can do.

James A. Levinsohn

Charles W. Goodyear Professor in Global Affairs
Professor of Economics and Management
Director of the Jackson Institute for global affairs