Harvard Business School awards Horace W. Goldsmith Fellowships of $10,000 each to seven to ten incoming MBA students each year, with recipients serving in leadership roles in nonprofit and public sector organizations, and demonstrating a strong commitment to continued career paths in these areas. Since 1990, 209 incoming students have received the fellowship, established by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and Richard L. Menschel (MBA 1959), a former director of the Foundation and a limited partner at Goldman Sachs. [...]

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. [...]

During her three years at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Yoonjin Min, MBA 2020, made the shift from serving as a generalist to a specialist in healthcare strategy. “I liked working on projects where success wasn’t just profit-oriented,” Yoonjin says, “but aimed at saving lives.” [...]