Students Reflect: A Roundtable on Summer Nonprofit Internships

Social Enterprise Newsletter, Fall 2001

Summer internships are a unique way for MBA students to explore an industry, try a new functional role, and apply new business skills in a real-world environment. Last summer, over 50 HBS students worked for social enterprises. Forty-eight—a record number—participated in the HBS Nonprofit and Public Management Summer Fellowship Program, which since 1982 has helped students find positions in social enterprise and supplemented their salaries from the organizations. Additionally, five students were Fellows through the HBS Community Enterprise Program, a collaborative effort with McKinsey & Co., in which HBS student interns provide strategic consulting to Boston-based nonprofit organizations. While benefiting the organizations and communities they serve, students were also able to develop their skills in a challenging management environment and explore future involvement in social enterprise.

What is it like to work as a nonprofit summer intern? Four HBS students shared their experiences with HBS Social Enterprise.

Amy Cogan, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in London, focused on projects to revitalize the tourism industry in Croatia and privatize a shipyard in Latvia.

Alex Nyhan, Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development in Washington, D.C., worked on a commercial revitalization project and a partnership between the District of Columbia and Las Americas Development Corporation.

Christine Tse, Youth Advocacy Project, Roxbury, Massachusetts, helped develop a strategic plan for the organization, which provides advocacy and legal representation for young people who are unable to pay for counsel in delinquency and youthful offender cases.

Louise Willington, HBS Community Enterprise Fellow, New Profit, Inc., Boston, worked with a teammate to develop recommendations for a strategy to grow the investor base of the venture philanthropy firm.

Why did you decide to pursue a social enterprise internship?

Nyhan: I came to HBS to acquire business skills to increase the impact I can have on social-purpose organizations, be they public or nonprofit. When I heard D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams speak at an HBS/KSG social enterprise conference, I was excited about his administration. They are making a major push to be more business-friendly, and a big mandate is to challenge the government to think more strategically about its proper role, performance, and accountability.

Tse: When I was looking for internships, I considered marketing and nonprofit positions. I became interested in the position because it combined those interests, along with strategy. My goals were to make a noticeable impact on an organization and to have the opportunity to use my leadership skills.

Cogan: My internship was an opportunity for me to balance my community-level experience (including two years in the Peace Corps) with business skills I am developing at HBS, and to explore how my HBS education can be applied to a developing country or a transition economy setting.

Willington: I worked in strategic consulting prior to HBS, primarily to large companies. I wanted to use the summer to learn about the nonprofit sector and to apply business skills in this setting. The Community Enterprise Program was ideal. It is specifically arranged for students to tackle the "what keeps you up at night" problems facing CEOs in the social sector.

What knowledge from the MBA program did you apply in your internship?

Tse: Being an outsider was beneficial in the eyes of my managers because I brought an unbiased perspective, as well as the language of business, to the organization. In developing the strategic plan for the Youth Advocacy Project, I was able to apply what I had learned in Competition and Strategy, which focuses on competitive positioning, understanding comparative costs, and network externalities.

Nyhan: I drew from [University Professor] Michael Porter's work on inner-city development, which established the framework for thinking about inner-city commerce in a new way, with the feeling that much more work needs to be done to reach out to minority groups that have historically been excluded. While much of the general class work in my first year was helpful background for my internship, Leadership and Organizational Behavior (LEAD) helped me to map out different stakeholders, and Entrepreneurial Management encouraged me to ask what could go wrong and to do little experiments to reduce uncertainty.

Cogan: I also found LEAD themes to be relevant. My work was team oriented, and the staff was very diverse. Observing the challenges that arise from different communication and work styles provided an opportunity for me to think about my own leadership style and reflect on how the cases we studied in LEAD can be applied to real work experiences. Since many of the projects I worked on involved Western European companies sponsoring and cofinancing projects in Eastern Europe, I also drew on discussions from my Business, Government, and the International Economy course.

What did you learn from your internship?

Cogan: Most of all, my internship emphasized a theme from the Society and Enterprise module—the importance, but often the extreme difficulty, of balancing charitable goals and the bottom line. I am more convinced than ever of the need for strong leadership and management skills in the nonprofit and public sectors, specifically for sophisticated finance skills to creatively tackle economic development issues without compromising banking integrity.

Willington: Before I started, I hardly knew what venture philanthropy was, didn't know much about the nonprofit sector, and hadn't worked in the United States. So, I learned a lot. The challenges of fundraising and measuring "social impact" became very apparent. It was exciting working with a two-year-old organization aiming to set very high standards in the rapidly changing venture philanthropy space. The fact that my teammate, Joan Cheng, and I "owned" the project meant that we made decisions and recommendations about the issues that we thought were most important to New Profit.

How has the internship shaped your thinking about future involvement in the social sector?

Cogan: Long term, I would like to continue in the field of international development. I am attracted to the intellectual challenge, variety, adventure, and, most important, the ability to make a meaningful difference. The internship allowed me to focus my personal learning objectives for the next academic year.

Tse: The internship reinforced that I should choose a career that I find enjoyable, not just one that is financially rewarding; in other words, I have heeded the advice from Career Services and will not be "following the herd." Because of my internship, I have become more interested in the nonprofit sector and have seen how an MBA can create value for nonprofit organizations. After graduating, I would like to devote several hours a month to a nonprofit by lending my business expertise and hopefully serve on the board of a nonprofit.

Willington: The experience has convinced me that I want to be involved in the social sector in the long term, but I don't know yet if it makes sense immediately after HBS. I'm going to look at several options in the next few months, including venture philanthropy in the U.K., and international development organizations.

Nyhan: I discovered that both progressive government and entrepreneurs do the same thing, detect and solve market failures—and there is plenty of opportunity to do that in the inner city. There is a nexus of business, finance, and helping people, and I want to be a part of that.