About Chris
Country: United States
Current Position: Manager of Global Partners at Harvard Business School
Previous University: Denison University
Undergraduate Degree: Communications
Q: What made you decide to earn an MBA?
A: My goal is to become a consultant, as it will give me the opportunity to work on the broadest range of projects in the widest variety of industries. Ultimately, I want to move into a management role and possibly launch my own business someday. To do that, I need to be able to see a business holistically and view each business decision strategically.
So far, my jobs have been entirely customer-focused—first as Manager of International Partnerships for the Mayor of Boston, and now at Harvard Business School, where I identify and recruit international businesses to host our students.
If I want to achieve my long-term goal, I have to learn more about the back-end of operating a business—how organizations work, how decisions are made, and what drives their finance and accounting decisions. And if I decide to start a business of my own someday, I'll need this knowledge for myself. I'll need to know how to grow a company, how to work with investors, and how to establish a budget. I believe I can learn all of this much faster in an MBA program than I can in my job.
Q: How will earning an MBA help you meet your career goals?
A: When you're caught up in your daily work, you're focused on the task at hand and don't have time to think as much about the big picture. My classes allow me to do that. The MBA curriculum is broad and exposes me to finance, technology, entrepreneurship, statistics, accounting, and more.
Q: Why did you choose the Northeastern Part-Time MBA program?
A: Academics have always worked best for me when I can apply what I learn immediately. The day after a class, I can almost always apply what I've learned to something I'm doing at work. For example, when I was taking an entrepreneurship class last summer, I was able to apply what we learned about investor relations to the challenges faced by a company I was working with in Bangkok.
Another big draw for me was flexibility. I travel extensively in my current job— Peru, Argentina, China, Thailand, Ghana, and Rwanda. Because of the flexibility of the Northeastern program, I can always make this work.
