Business Beyond the Bottom Line: Why I chose to spend my internship working with entrepreneurs in Salt Lake City
This summer, in place of an internship, I am working with 5 small businesses in my hometown of Salt Lake City, Utah for 2 weeks at a time. I am working alongside social entrepreneurs to identify and address points of friction in their businesses as well as telling their stories. A few weeks ago, as I talked on the phone with Rishi Moudgil from the Center for Social Impact, debriefing my experience with my first business, he gently reminded me that to effectively tell their stories, I have to first tell mine.
In reflecting on how I found myself back in Utah, after nearly 10 years of being away, I had to go back to 3 years ago, when I was working in corporate finance in New York City. I was young and eager, walking a path paved by privilege toward a destination defined for me by the aspirations of others. I was on the fast-track to a successful career — I had an incredible boss who invested more in my development than I will ever be able to thank him for, and I was surrounded by amazing peers, friends and family who supported and continue to support me through the growing pains of what is now a very winding path. Despite having all the fixins, I was unfulfilled and generally unhappy. It was frustrating to know that I had every advantage and yet happiness continued to elude me.
As so many of us do, I thought I would find the answer in grad school. At the time, I set my sights on clinical psychology. I started volunteering for a suicide prevention hotline on nights and weekends to get some relevant work experience. I would answer the phone and do my best to listen and validate the emptiness and despair that anonymous strangers were describing. Then the sun would come up, I would don my suit and go to work, where I would split my time between meetings and negotiating with excel spreadsheets.
My time at the hotline was an incredible gift. It forced me to step outside of myself for a few hours and focus wholly on another person’s experience. Despite my gratitude for the work, I found myself increasingly frustrated with the organization itself. Volunteer turnover was high (at just under 1 year, I was one of the longest tenured volunteers on staff despite training in a cohort of at least 30), caller management was poor, training felt insufficient, and the facilities lacked basic technology. Essentially, I felt like we could better serve our callers under different management. I don’t say any of this to take away from the incredible work of the organization and the men and women who are supporting individuals in the darkest moments of their lives. I say it because this was the first time that I saw the potential for business to make a positive difference. I reflected on the resources at my disposal at my day job and imagined a world in which that type of energy could be applied to the hotline.
From there, it was an MBA all the way. If I could learn how to run an effective business, I reasoned, then I could take that toolkit and manage a highly effective nonprofit. I could merge the worlds of my day job and my night job, use my forces for good, and the world would make sense again. I wrote my admissions essays about this new master plan to start a nonprofit and save the world, submitted my applications, and soon (although it felt very long), I was packing my bags for Ann Arbor, Michigan and the Stephen M. Ross School of Business.
I’ve heard the first year of business school compared to drinking from the firehose, which is apt. The entire thing is a whirlwind of new friends, classes, recruiters, clubs, bars, and theme parties, and everyone seems to know what they’re doing, which, in hindsight, is completely impossible. In the midst of this whirlwind, I faced the all-too-common but rarely spoken of career crisis of MBA1s. I’d quit my job and was starting fresh, so the world was my oyster, but I felt paralyzed by the pressure to take the “right” next step. Where to next? What was THE job for me? Where could I make the MOST impact? I felt committed to the “social impact” path that I had come to Ross for, but was losing my faith in the nonprofit of my imagination, as all of my peers seemed to be recruiting for consulting with enviable certainty about their path. Many said that this was the best stepping stone to whatever career they actually wanted long term. Suddenly, I felt the soon-to-be familiar panic as I wondered whether I was throwing my life away by not pursuing one of the coveted internships at the major consulting firms.While I never took the plunge into recruiting for consulting or one of the other “real jobs” that my peers have secured, I would stay up nights worrying that I would never be able to pay off my loans because I didn’t suit up and attend the right corporate happy hours. But there’s no going back now.
B-school is basically a series of exercises where you are called upon to demonstrate your certainty about every step you have taken in your life up to this point and every step you plan to take from now until the end of time. From the moment we apply, we are asked, “why business school, why Ross, why this corporation?,” and every question is expected to have a clear, logical and compelling (read: well-rehearsed) answer.
Meanwhile my brain was thinking, “Really I just want to change the world, is that so much to ask?, I believe your organization has a role to play. I’m interested in this position as a trial run to see if it’s what I’m looking for, but it’s impossible to know if it’s a fit after just a few conversations. So how about that job?”
Much of my first year passed in this stressful and confusing way, until a day when a sprinkle of fairy dust rained down on me in the form of a classmate. We had overlapped a lot during recruiting, and bumped into each other in a frenzy between “urgent” meetings that have long since faded into obscurity. I asked her about recruiting, the standard greeting for MBAs between the months of October and February. She responded something to the effect of “I have no idea what I’m doing. I don’t know what I want or where to apply, and every piece of advice I get is contradictory to the last.”
Suddenly, it became OK not to have everything figured out because there were 2 of us that had no idea what was happening. She was speaking truth to the feeling so many of us were trying to stifle: uncertainty. She and I commiserated in cluelessness through the recruiting process, and ultimately joined forces with 2 other classmates to participate in a program called MBAs Across America, a 5-week fellowship where teams drive across the country to work with social entrepreneurs and confront the realities of business and social change in America.
I also accepted a position with the General Motors Foundation, hoping to test my theory that the greatest change could come from socially responsible business practices within corporate behemoths. This theory is sometimes considered attempting to change the direction on the Titanic, or more optimistically referred to as the ripple effect, depending on whether you’re a glass half-empty or half-full kind of person.
By the time I returned to school in the fall, I had worked for 6 businesses in 5 states ranging from 2 employees to more than 200,000, and all identifying with some form of social mission. In 15 weeks, I met people who were passionate, apathetic, brilliant, crazy, kind, angry, full of hope and full of frustration. During that time, I confronted some new understandings about the ways of the world. As it turns out, profitability overrides a good cause, a cause is not enough to make a business succeed, and justice often doesn’t prevail in the land of the free. My entire understanding of the world was assaulted and my delusions about the way things “should” work were stripped from me without warning as I was supposed to be settling on a career path. I stood naked with my future before me, a past behind me that felt like a lie, no sense of the clarity I had been hoping for, and a stronger motivation to change the world than ever because I felt like I was finally seeing it.
I was fueled by the examples I had seen of entrepreneurs who refused to accept the status quo, equipped with a whole new set of skills and experiences, and accompanied by a tribe of equally curious peers who were ready for the adventure. In the process of losing my rosy colored view of the world, I learned that there is not growth in certainty. I could not learn by already knowing, I could not improve by only doing what I was already good at, I could not create change through more of the same. There isn’t just one way to effect change or just one type of person that will be the agent. There are as many paths to change as there are people who want to see it, and there are incredible people working their asses off every day to build a better world despite the fact that most of them are paving the path as they go.
As I thought about the next step to take this summer, I felt pulled to Utah, the place that was responsible for shaping so much of my understanding of the world, and a place that had always seemed to exist in a strange and isolated bubble, insulated from social problems. I wanted to work with small businesses to continue my exploration of social entrepreneurship as an important piece of the change-the-world master plan that my friends and I have slowly, and sometimes unknowingly, been drafting. I wanted to share the stories of entrepreneurs who have chosen to embrace uncertainty because they believe in finding a better way, and who create hope by inspiring others to think more deeply about what they are buying, who they are buying it from and how they are engaging with their communities.
As it became clear to me that no existing internship that I knew of was going to fit my freshly baked idea for the summer, I began reaching out to anyone and everyone connected to small business in Salt Lake City, and soon had a list of entrepreneurs crazy enough to welcome a complete stranger into their businesses and let me write about it for the whole world (or at least my mom) to read.
I pitched my “internship” to the Center for Social Impact and the Erb Institute at Ross, with the expectation that they would tell me to accept a standard internship offer and think of my future before doing something rash. Instead, they were energized by the idea and wanted to talk about the possibilities for impacting businesses, encouraging students to deviate from the norm, and reinforcing new ways of learning about social impact and sustainability. They supported me fully, and gave me the final nudge I needed to pack my bags for Salt Lake City. Throughout the entire process I have been thrilled and humbled by the support from Ross and from my classmates who call, text and email again and again to ask about my project and offer their help. I owe so much to the Ross community, who have empowered me to question the world around me, imagine a better reality and begin to believe that we can build it.
Each time I meet a new entrepreneur here, I get asked what I plan to do after school, and each time I take a breath and tell them honestly that I have no idea. It feels liberating and terrifying to say out loud. Of course, this is not such a radical response to individuals who have chosen to invent their own jobs, but my 2-years-ago self would have shuddered to hear me acknowledge such uncertainty. What I know now is that as long as I continue to do things that make me feel inspired and excited to get up in the morning, the rest will come.