After Parag Jalan graduated from college with an engineering degree, he started his career as an analyst at BlackRock. But while the financial sector offered rigorous training and hands-on experience, the “impact chain” was too long—in other words, he told Pooja Rai ’24 during an episode of the podcast Career Conversations earlier this year, he couldn’t “put names and faces to the people I was actually helping.”
The search for a more directly impactful role took Jalan to Swaziland and Cambodia, where he worked on programs increasing access to HIV treatment with the Clinton Health Access Initiative. To gain the skills necessary for long-term success in the nonprofit sector, he decided to pursue an MBA, and Yale SOM emerged as a school that aligned with his values: “It had that ‘and society’ angle embedded in all its core courses,” he said.
At SOM, Jalan joined the Social Impact Consulting Club, where he helped develop career opportunities for refugees living in New Haven, and sought out classes that emphasized the overlap between the public and private sectors, like Ethical Choices in Public Leadership. After graduation, he put those lessons to work through roles at the One Acre Fund and Teach for India, where he now helps the organization work with the government to expand its programs. That work involves balancing government regulation with the risk-taking necessary to implement creative and sound educational solutions.
Jalan’s diverse professional experiences, he said, have helped him developed a holistic perspective on the most pressing social issues facing India today. “No matter how well we solve the education problem, for example, a child isn’t going to school if they have bad health,” he said. “We need to focus on a person as a whole.”
Reflecting on his many career transitions, Jalan advised current SOM students to remember that “you are your own benchmark.”
“Professional progress is less about comparing yourself to others, what your classmates have achieved, than where you are,” he said. “The most important piece is whether you’re out-performing your average self.”
On the Career Conversations podcast, Yale SOM students sit down with alumni for a series of candid conversations about career paths, industries, opportunities for business school graduates, and discussions on career topics including work-life balance and creating a meaningful impact in business and society. Listen and subscribe.
