Internship Spotlight: Roxane Debaty ’20
What did you do this past summer? We asked rising second-year MBA students to check in from their summer internships, where they applied the lessons of their first year at Yale SOM.
Roxane Debaty ’20
Internship: REDF Farber Intern at Women’s Bean Project, Denver, Colorado
Hometown: Greenville, South Carolina, and Clermont-Ferrand, France
Favorite Yale SOM class: Global Macroeconomy
Clubs and affiliations: Student Government Community Service Chair, Blue Cohort classroom dynamics rep, and TA for Accounting, Customer, Operations, and State & Society classes
Favorite New Haven eatery: House of Naan
Favorite Yale SOM Community event: SOM Serves
Fun facts: I’ve run eight half-marathons (very slowly). Two articles I wrote on packaging baby formula and sustainable packaging were published in Australia’s Packaging World in 2013. I make the best crêpes, and I use my Belgian grandmother’s recipe (my French grandmother can never read this). I’ve seen an anaconda in the wild, right next to our boat (Brazil).
Listening to the stories of the participants in the Women’s Bean Project as an REDF Farber intern, I’ve learned so much about resilience in the face of systematized injustice and redemption in the face of hopelessness. I’ve also learned that the for-profit world gives us incredible tools to solve quantitative and qualitative problems, but that the difficulty lies in implementing solutions seamlessly and with sustained impact—whether that be in a 12-person team at a nonprofit or in a global 100-person team at a multinational CPG.
Our 12-person Farber Intern Class has been an incredible source of knowledge and encouragement. I’ve met 11 brilliant, open-hearted, triple-bottom-line motivated MBA students from schools across the country and experiences across industries, and I couldn’t have asked for a better tribe to learn from as we navigated our respective projects. We also had the chance to meet REDF CEO Carla Javits, a front runner in the expansion of mission-based business, and REDF Board member George Roberts from KKR, which was a surreal experience with its fair share of wise council.
I knew I had made the right choice when our Farber class decided to spend the second weekend we knew each other in Sonoma together, touring wineries. As someone hoping to stand at the front of the growing bridge between for- and nonprofit businesses, I believe an internship at REDF was the perfect fit to bridge these two worlds and feel like my summer made an impact.