Jennifer Boone - Why I Chose an MBA in the Nonprofit Space

The following is an computer-generated summary of the video transcript.

Hi, I'm Jennifer Boone and I'm a recent graduate of the Dallas MBA program, class of 2021. I grew up in Dallas, Texas and attended Texas A&M. For my undergraduate degree and I majored in ecosystem science and management, which is in the school of agriculture. And immediately after school, I went to work for a utility company where I was in the waste management department and really saw how the end of the supply chain worked and was responsible for the disposal of a lot of the materials within our supply chain. But I wanted to be closer to food and agriculture. So I jumped over to the produce industry um and took a job working on a comprehensive supply chain sustainability program for a network of regional produce distributors. And a lot of this job was working with local growers and introducing them to wholesale markets. From there, I moved to a national nonprofit in the food access and nutrition education space where I managed to supply chain that funneled fresh produce to low-income families through school. It was this job director of sourcing that I held while I was attending McCombs, I decided to pursue an MBA when I found myself in this supply chain role without much formal education around it and I thought that an MBA would both help me do my job better and have a better understanding of how to be good at my job, but also opened doors for me in the future. I looked around and I saw all these nonprofit leaders and it looked to me like the most successful nonprofit leaders, the most impactful leaders in both the nonprofit and the social impact space had some experience in business previously and that helped them best understand how to drive change. So I felt that pursuing an MBA Would prepare me for a leadership role in the future. Whether that was at a for-profit company where I could impact how to use their resources, philanthropically or at a nonprofit, where I could have a better sense of how to build broad stakeholder partnerships to benefit the community.