Purposeful Career Insights & Recommendations from Inspiring Capital MBA Impact Fellows

The Inspiring Capital MBA Impact Fellowship is a professional development opportunity that provides knowledge, tools, and community for MBAs committed to using their business education as a force for good seeking to grow purposefully into a high-impact professional. Topics covered include latest thinking and practice in social and environmental impact, as well as the skills and personal development tools required to navigate a successful purpose-driven career. The program is fully virtual, designed to complement any summer internship, regardless of location, industry, or project assignment.

Today we are interviewing Ankita Terrell, a 2018 Inspiring Capital MBA Impact Fellowship alumni. She walks us through her summer with Inspiring Capital, how the Fellowship influenced her career development and gives current MBA students insights and advice stemming from her purposeful growth learnings.

Tell us about yourself! What is your name, university and program that you attended, your IC Impact Fellowship year and your professional career?

My name is Ankita Terrell and I was an MBA Impact Fellow with Inspiring Capital in 2018. I pursued an MBA at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. I currently work with Ashoka, the biggest organization electing social entrepreneurs around the world. I work on the corporate side with organizations such as General Motors, Microsoft and Google. I help them think about how they can plug into the social impact ecosystem, how they can look to contribute positively to change in areas such as combating climate change, transforming technology to be more empathetic and supporting women entrepreneurs around the world. I also help them with corporate transformation. I help them understand how to bring the principles that will enable all parts of their business to work well and purposefully.

What was your background before the IC MBA Impact Fellowship?

After graduating undergrad, I went to work as a graduate fellow at a venture capital firm in New York funding women-founded businesses. I fell in love with the startup and investment space, so I transitioned into working at a startup doing analytics. Then moved into the corporate side at what is now Gartner in an analytics function as well. At this point I realized I really wanted to do more. I had started a nonprofit on the side and was loving everything I was doing. Next, I ended up getting an invitation to join a nonprofit that I absolutely loved, so I made the transition into working in analytics and pricing strategy for them. It was a wonderful experience, but I realized that there was such more that I could be doing so I decided to go to business school. I wasn’t really thinking about going into nonprofit after business school, I was thinking more about the opportunity to transform and disrupt the way business is typically done.

What led you to pursue your MBA? When you started your MBA, what did you think your ideal purposeful career would be?

I wanted to get an MBA because I hoped to gain a good balance of different toolkits to be more strategic. I wanted to understand how companies managed to scale and be successful, and then bring that understanding to other organizations to do “good work”- similar to the business-for-good movement. My idea of a purposeful career after business school was to find and work for a company that has managed to be both profitable and thoughtful around the change that they’re making in the world.

I wanted to find a company that is actively thinking about things like last mile delivery, or is intentionally transparent on how their goods and services came to be. I can’t say that I had a specific industry or career in mind. I just knew that I really needed to be somewhere that is taking care of all stakeholders in their ecosystem from employees to customers.

How did the IC MBA Impact Fellowship change/influence your career path and thinking around a “purposeful career”?

I felt like I was on an island before I came to Inspiring Capital. You go to business school and have these lofty ideas about seeing good in the world and seeing social change, but you then imminently get pulled into recruiting for consulting or investment banking roles. These paths work for some people and they are really good at it, but they didn’t work for me. I felt a bit lost prior to coming to Inspiring Capital.

During the Fellowship I was suddenly surrounded by a group of incredible people with similar passions, intellect, and a drive to get things done and to create real change.

Inspiring Capital really made me understand that it is possible to think about social change in a way that does necessarily entail doing direct service to improve people’s lives. Throughout the summer, I was very motivated by all the people who led our workshops and trainings. They had amazing speakers from companies like Patagonia and Salesforce. They would come talk to us and engage with us on a very deep level about what and how they were thinking of impact and how they were engaging with these ideas around building an ecosystem of change-making. It is imperative that companies do bring in these ideas into everyday work; otherwise, these change-making values are going to be sitting on a website or brochure and not actually aligned with the day-to-day work that is being done.

What role does professional development work play in helping someone identify or pursue a purposeful career?

Professional development touches on a couple of things. One of them is that you very clearly never stop learning, since there are so many things that are constantly changing and evolving. For me, professional development is keeping up to date with new industry standards and organizational leadership around the world. I also think finding people that you can work with and look up to is such a key part of professional development because I feel the need to have people that I look up to, and then pay it forward. I think Inspiring Capital does this incredibly well.

The people I met at IC have truly been my closest friends and strongest network even post-MBA. Once you are an IC Fellow you are connected to this incredible network for life.

A quality network to learn from and grow with is a really important part of my professional development because I’m constantly learning and becoming a better employee, a better manager and better equipped to contribute to business for good.

What would you tell an MBA interested in a purposeful career?

I think it is important to think about what matters to you personally. Typically, when we go to business school we get so caught up in the idea that we have to fix the world’s problems, and also continuously compare ourselves to everyone else, especially salary-wise. It takes intentional effort to overcome all these setbacks and the imposter syndrome to realize that there’s a lot more to life than just work. I think that a purposeful career will allow you to successfully integrate all the other components of your life. I believe we shouldn’t think of work as something completely outside of life or as its own silo. I’d advise others to ask yourself, “Am I happy at my job? Am I happy spending 8–10 hours a day with my co-workers and doing the work that I am doing?” Look for opportunities where you can answer, “Yes” to both of these questions. That is my biggest piece of advice.

Second, there is a lot of pressure to find the perfect job after your MBA, but I’d challenge others to consider the idea that there is no such thing as the perfect job. Instead focus on your top three job aspects- what aspects of a job that will affect your work-life and overall lifestyle the most. I personally thought about what was most important to me. Culture was my number one, having good managers was my number two and work-life integration was my number three. Figuring out my top three really informed my decision-making. Next, remember that it is better to wait on a good fit for you, it might take a couple of months longer than everyone else, but it doesn’t mean you’re not going to find that opportunity that is the next right fit for you.

Inspiring Capital is a NYC-based B Corp that offers learning and development services for professionals and organizations. Inspiring Capital’s mission is to guide people to meaningful lives. IC exists to give others the permission, invitations, tools, guidance, inspiration, and accountability that we all want and need to grow purposefully toward our wholehearted potential. So that, together, we can build healthier, fairer, more inclusive, equitable, just, and regenerative teams, organizations, societies, and economies.

Learn more about Inspiring Capital here.

Learn more about Inspiring Capital Impact Fellowship here.

Interested applying for the Inspiring Capital Impact Fellowship? Click here!

Watch an Informational Webinar on YouTube to learn more about Summer 2021 IC MBA Impact Fellowship details, logistics and program adjustments here.