Working to protect the environment has been my passion for as long as I can remember. My father was my earliest inspiration. As an officer in the Indian Forest Service, he devoted his life to balancing day to day realities of economic development with environmental conservation. For me, climate change was a reality we lived with every day – experienced in wildly fluctuating rains that flooded my house, turbulent storms that eroded roads, and increases in sea levels that caused thousands of Maldivians to migrate to my city. [...]

Prior to Harvard Business School, I spent eight years on active duty military service as an Aviation officer and helicopter pilot in the United States Army. My career took me to three countries, six states, and countless hours of flying high in the sky and low to the ground, over water and below the treeline. I led organizations ranging in size from 17 soldiers to 120, in missions both operational and maintenance support. Yet one consistent theme throughout all of it was my sense of having a mission-driven life, of giving my time and energy to something greater than myself. So when I left the Army to attend HBS, I knew I wanted to try and capture that same sense of purpose. [...]

Prior to HBS my career spanned a kaleidoscopic range of topics. I’ve hopscotched across different sectors, at NASA assisting on a lunar rover mission; a stint in finance performing the usual fiduciary responsibilities; and time at a tech company, helping to build programmatic advertising products. Depending on how you tilt your head and squint at my résumé, I could appear to be an engineer, a financier, or a techie. [...]

Before HBS, I moved to Kenya so that I could work on critical infrastructure projects and help build the foundation of countries. While contributing to some of the largest energy and transportation projects in the region was rewarding, I realized that none of the projected development would materialize without a healthy population. It became clear that global health was an integral component to development and that an “investment in human capital, partly through global health, is a prerequisite to inclusive economic growth” (Former president of World Bank, Jim Yong Kim). This summer I sought out to test a hypothesis of mine that led me to apply to business school: that the skills developed through an MBA could contribute to solving some of the world’s toughest global health issues. [...]

This post is part of our Social Enterprise Initiative 25th anniversary blog series, which highlights some of the faculty, staff, students, and alumni who have been a part of SEI throughout the years. In this post, Laura Oller (MBA/MPP 2019) describes the social impact she seeks to have in the world and shares her vision for the future of social enterprise at HBS. [...]