Bringing Yale’s Most Inspiring Professors and Ideas to Evans Hall

Back in the fall of 2014, while I was on a tour of another business school,  I asked our student guide how much time the MBAs spent with other grad students. With the response, any interest I had in the school instantly vanished—“Why would we hang out with other grad students when there are so many awesome people in our program?”

I quietly slipped away from the group, got in my car, and drove away relieved that I had one less application to write.

This kind of insular thinking is antithetical to who I am and what I was looking for in a business school. Yale SOM’s objective is to be the business school that is most integrated with its home university, and hearing that message articulated on an admissions visit was a big part of what drew me here.

I’ve found that my classmates do genuinely want to connect with other graduate and professional students, but academics, recruiting, extracurriculars, and social lives pull us in so many different directions that it can be hard to find the time. As SOM’s Senator on the Graduate and Professional Student Senate (GPSS), my job is to make it even easier for SOMers to learn about and experience everything that Yale has to offer.

This past March, in one of GPSS’s biggest events of the year, we brought some of Yale’s most respected faculty to Evans Hall for Inspiring Yale, a one-day event that showcases some of the most exciting work happening at each of Yale’s 13 graduate and professional schools. Students from each school nominate and vote for faculty to deliver short, TED-style presentations during an evening symposium designed to inform, intrigue, and inspire. From talks about the importance of human cooperation to the latest in finding a cure for cancer, it was a refreshing reminder of the richness of research and scholarship going on all around us.

Business can’t be a siloed field of study. When we graduate, we’ll need to be comfortable working in multi-disciplinary teams and engaging with diverse issues that span sectors and industries. For me, events like Inspiring Yale embody these aspirations and serve as a gentle reminder not to let SOM become a insulated bubble of awesome people and opportunities.

If you didn’t get a chance to attend this year, we’re making Inspiring Yale 2017 better than ever before, so when the time comes, don’t forget to nominate and vote for your favorite professors, and reserve your tickets early. Don’t miss out—they go fast!