Seven members of HBS’s MBA Class of 2007 -- Sachin Jain, Anthony D’Avella, José Antonio Morán, Jean-Philippe (JP) Odunlami, John Serafini, Heather Thompson, and Arturo Weiss Pick -- have been selected as winners of the School’s prestigious Dean’s Award. This annual award, established in 1997, recognizes the “extraordinary non-academic achievements” of graduating students.
“This award reflects the remarkable activities and achievements of our students outside the classroom,” said Dean J Light. “Recipients have set their sights on making our campus and our world a better place. We are happy to honor their accomplishments,” he added.
All students recognized for this honor have made their mark with contributions to a social cause, while pursing a grinding schedule of studies at HBS.
Nominations for the awards come from the HBS community, and the recipients are chosen by a selection committee made of faculty, administrators, and students.
MBAUniverse.com profiles the seven winners:
Sachin Jain:
After three years at Harvard Medical School (HMS), Sachin Jain decided he also wanted to earn an MBA degree. He came to HBS campus in 2005 with a passion for healthcare policy issues and a personal quest to make the world a better place, says HBS. He has taken on leadership roles with student organizations at both HBS and HMS and has consistently shown a tireless devotion to the causes he undertakes.
During his first year at HBS, Jain received an e-mail detailing the plight of a person in desperate need of a donor for a bone marrow transplant. As a minority, the patient was underrepresented in the national bone marrow registries. Jain saw the situation as a call to action and founded the Harvard Bone Marrow Initiative to help improve the number of minority donors.
Jain co-chaired the initiative throughout his two years at the Business School, expanding it into a university-wide coalition that unites ethnic and minority student groups not only at HBS and HMS, but also at Harvard College, Harvard Law School, the Kennedy School of Government, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and the School of Public Health. In addition, he continued to support the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter, where he had launched a health clinic as a Harvard undergraduate.
Jain has also published a collection of essays he co-edited in 2006, titled The Soul of a Doctor. Jain will return to HMS next fall to complete his medical degree, but he has left a lasting mark on his classmates, says HBS.
Anthony D’Avella, Jean-Philippe Odunlami, Heather Thompson:
A passion to help the people of New Orleans recover from the destruction of Hurricane Katrina still burns strong in Anthony D’Avella, JP Odunlami, and Heather Thompson. Members of the Business School’s original Hurricane Katrina Relief Organizing Committee, which led a weeklong “trek” to Louisiana during the 2006 winter break, these students were moved by the experience and eager to do more to bring help and hope to New Orleans residents.
As a result, they participated in the project again this year, working throughout the fall to plan another trip to help with relief and rebuilding efforts in the devastated region.
“Student projects often don’t continue beyond the first year,” their nominator said. But one reason D’Avella, Odunlami, and Thompson wanted to stay involved was to help ensure that the New Orleans Service Immersion “could be institutionalized.” That has worked out just the way they wanted. Another HBS team will head for New Orleans next January.
José Antonio Morán and Arturo Weiss Pick:
At this year’s Latin America conference at HBS, a student event in January co-chaired and organized by José Antonio Morán and Arturo Weiss Pick “brought Latin America back to Harvard Business School.”
Morán and Weiss Pick were the driving force behind the conference, sponsored by the Club Latinoamericano. The event was a “great source of pride for the entire HBS Latino community,” noted a first-year student involved with the planning. The conference not only raised student awareness of the opportunities and challenges Latin America faces, but also “enhanced the image and reputation of HBS in Latin America.”
Six hundred participants from more than 30 universities and 50 companies in the United States and Latin America gathered at HBS to brainstorm on Latin America’s position in the global economy. The conference hosted two former Presidents of Peru and Colombia and had former finance ministers and top executives of influential Latin American companies among its speakers.
An “effective ambassador for Mexico, Latin America, and all developing countries,” is how one student described Morán.
John Serafini:
As he was joining HBS, John Serafini’s younger sister was diagnosed with thyroid cancer – a disease she recovered from thanks to the care she received at the renowned Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston.
Serafini was but eager to do something that would have a long-term impact on helping other young cancer patients become cancer survivors. As a result, after arriving at HBS, he began to formulate a business plan for a nonprofit organization he created with the help of several other HBS and KSG students. The new venture, which was a winner in the social enterprise track of the 2006 HBS Business Plan Contest, is now an up-and-running concern called Mountains for Miracles: Climbing for Life (MFM). Its mission is to eventually raise $5 million to support innovative research in pediatric oncology at Dana-Farber “through the pursuit of epic mountaineering and trekking endeavors.”
That means that about two times a year, teams of 15 to 20 climbers will seek sponsors to donate money to back their ascent of the world’s highest peaks, including Mt. Everest.
Serafini has a longstanding interest and expertise in mountaineering, and has devoted 30 to 40 hours a week beyond his HBS workload to getting Mountains for Miracles off the ground.
