Forging My Own Path as a Silver Scholar
Casey Ma ’26 chose the Silver Scholars program to complement her passion for social impact with a business skill set—and transformed her understanding of what her career could look like.
Before coming to Yale SOM, I thought I knew what my career would look like. I focused on traditional paths in biotech, pharma, or healthcare consulting, and saw my trajectory as structured: build expertise, move up within an organization, and grow into a senior role over time.
At the same time, I knew something was missing. I had strong exposure to a specific industry, but I lacked the business toolkit to understand how decisions are made, organizations grow, and innovations move from idea to implementation.
The Silver Scholars program, which lets students pursue an MBA immediately after graduating college, provided me both acceleration into business training at an early stage and access to a set of resources that fundamentally reshaped how I think about careers.
Through SOM’s core curriculum, I was able to structure my thinking about business problems. I learned how incentives shape decisions, how operations and strategy interact, and how to approach complex problems with a clear framework. Elective classes also played an important role in this shift, pushing me beyond applying frameworks and equipping me to approach unfamiliar problems from scratch. Some of my favorites include:
- Creativity and Innovation: I worked on projects that connected seemingly disparate ideas, challenging how I think about what outcomes are feasible.
- Gen AI for Managers: we experimented with how AI tools can be used to solve business problems, which reshaped how I approach the “intelligent age” and leverage these new technologies.
- Education Policy and Leadership: I developed a systems-level perspective on education as a complex, intentionally designed ecosystem; and gained insight into program design and institutional strategy through my admissions and student ambassador work here at SOM.
Outside the classroom, global study further expanded how I think about business in context. During the International Experience trip to Costa Rica, I engaged directly with local entrepreneurs, family business owners, and operators across different industries. What stood out to me was how business decisions were shaped not only by market dynamics, but also by community relationships, cultural context, and resource constraints. This experience offered a grounded view of how businesses are built and sustained in environments that differ significantly from large corporate settings. Conversations with founders and leaders made it clear that while business frameworks can be transferable, how they are applied depends heavily on context.
I also benefited from exposure to different business environments during lunch-and-learns, speaker events, and smaller discussions across industries that taught me that leaders navigate similar challenges in different settings. Through my experience leading clubs, organizing the Yale Healthcare Conference, and participating in Yale Philanthropy Conference and Education Leadership Conference, I began to see how these ways of thinking translate across contexts. Instead of viewing my career as a single path, I started to see it as a set of possibilities shaped by where and how I chose to apply the frameworks learned at SOM.
As I looked for a way to put this expanded perspective to work, I got involved with Yale Ventures, pitching in with the weekly Innovation Speaker Series and the Yale Innovation Summit. In these settings, I found myself thinking more carefully about how conversations are designed. Our task wasn’t just bringing people together, but shaping discussions in ways that surface meaningful insights and create real connections between founders, investors, and researchers. Being part of that process gave me a closer look at how ideas move from early-stage research into ventures that can actually scale.
A similar shift happened at Tsai CITY, where I served as a network curator. Running weekly programming and thematic mentoring sessions made me realize how much intention goes into building an environment where ideas can develop. It required thinking about how to match people, structure interactions, and create space for honest feedback.
At the same time, SOM’s career ecosystem—which includes the Career Development Office and professional clubs, many of which offer recruiting programming—helped me understand recruiting in practice and prepared me for written tests, and technical and behavioral interviews.
With that combination of structure and support, I was fortunate to receive full-time offers from Y Combinator, Bristol Myers Squibb, the CDC, Ascension, the Mayo Clinic, IQVIA, and an alumni-founded education consulting company. At age 23, I was having conversations and opportunities that I previously thought would come much later; many of my peers in the program experienced something similar.
Looking back, what the Silver Scholars program changed most was not the speed of my career, but its scope. Being in this environment pushed me to explore directions I had not initially considered. I began to see that the same management principles used to run organizations can also be applied to designing systems that encourage creativity, adaptability, and new ways of thinking. At the same time, exposure to SOM’s entrepreneurial ecosystem made entrepreneurship feel not just accessible, but viable as a long-term path. In your early 20s, there are very few environments where you can gain this level of exposure across industries, roles, and ways of thinking while still building a strong academic foundation.
Because of this experience, I now have more options, and more agency, than I originally expected. Going forward, I’m less concerned with choosing the “right” path and more focused on developing the ability to navigate uncertainty and make thoughtful decisions along the way. In many ways, I feel brighter than I was before: not because I have everything figured out, but because I now understand how many different paths exist, and how to move between them.
