Kelsey Roberts’ path to Harvard Business School was anything but typical. In this episode, she shares how she applied through the 2+2 program as an engineering student at Georgia Tech and used her deferral to explore manufacturing, entrepreneurship, and workforce development. Kelsey discusses her unique application strategy, the decision to wait four years before starting at HBS, and how her MBA has shaped her impact at Forage. Whether you’re an early-career applicant or exploring nontraditional MBA paths, Kelsey’s story offers inspiration and insight.
Thank you for having me. I started my life as an engineer from Georgia Tech and began my career working in manufacturing plants and healthcare with Abbott all across the United States and then eventually in Ireland as well. I was working in these manufacturing plants and realized how a lot of the changing nature of jobs and the location of them in the United States was affecting so many communities. That set me down a path of really wanting to focus my career on the problem space of how do we create jobs? How do we create economic opportunity throughout the country and throughout society?
After I finished up two years at Abbott, I started exploring entrepreneurship as a method of creating jobs for folks. I did some programs where I was teaching entrepreneurship in Ireland and in South Africa to help people start their own businesses so that they could create jobs in their communities, create income for themselves and their families, and then ultimately create economic opportunity around the world.
That was a bit of my journey before HBS, and that's something that I came into HBS wanting to continue - really wanting to further that: how do we develop economic opportunity and job creation and support through both public and private sector? I spent a lot of my time at HBS focused on that space and then have been working in that area since then through both the government in the city of Detroit as well as a startup where we help students get connected to jobs.
At what point were you not enjoying engineering, or was it more that you were seeing something that was just way more a fit with your personal values and seemed way more of a passion?
When I was at Georgia Tech thinking about what I would do next, I was working in engineering, did some work in research at school, then interned with Abbott, and I was starting to think: how can I apply this engineering degree towards serving the community, towards the broader world of business? That's actually what opened up my eyes to thinking about an MBA and thinking about the 2+2 program.
I knew probably halfway through my college career that I didn't want to work in a research lab, that I didn't want to go to medical school or go on and do a PhD. I wanted to do something where I was interacting with people, bringing products out to the market, getting to understand customer needs, getting to solve problems and see the impact of them live in the short term, getting to deliver results. That's what I really loved. So that led me to apply for the 2+2 program.
At that point, I was thinking I would use it for a completely different thing. I was thinking I would use an MBA for mergers and acquisitions in healthcare, bringing in innovations and products, getting them out to the market. That didn't end up being the route I went down, really, because about my third rotation at Abbott - it was a rotational program - I'd seen enough in these manufacturing plants and I was noticing this trend of how it was affecting people's lives not to have the job stability that they had always relied on in their families for generations. That really got me passionate about that problem.
It wasn't that I didn't like the initial problem. I still care a lot about healthcare innovation and think it's a great thing, and I'm happy a lot of people are working in that space, but I really just got interested personally in this problem and the passion of that took over and led me down a different path.
I definitely wrote about learning how to understand the financial side of things, learning how to understand the necessary business case to acquire companies. I was thinking a lot about innovative products that were in the market in a startup sense and how you could commercialize them. And with my experience at a large company like Abbott, I was thinking about how a large company could support some of those smaller companies in bringing their innovations to market. I thought the MBA would help me really understand the financial aspects of that, making the business case, making those relationships, and ultimately what mergers and acquisitions look like - which definitely is a world I learned more about at HBS than I ever did at any other point in my career. It's a little bit of a black box to folks that are working in a lot of areas of the industry. Getting to have some cases and classmates who'd been in that mergers and acquisitions space did help me understand more about it, even though by the time I was at HBS, that wasn't really what I was focused on.
I honestly would say I felt very lucky to find out about it. It certainly wasn't funneled to me, and I'm not sure I would have noticed it on my own. In one of my first internships at Abbott, I was paired with a mentor, a woman who was a couple of years older than me, and she had applied to the 2+2 program. I learned about it just through my personal relationship with her. As I found out about it and started digging and doing some research, I found some other folks from Georgia Tech who were a few years older than me and in my same scholarship program at Georgia Tech who had applied to the 2+2 program. I got to talk with them and understand more about the process through that personal network. But it was really just luck in that I met somebody who happened to be doing it, and that opened my eyes to it.
I do think it's one of the best-kept secrets at HBS, especially for folks from engineering or nontraditional MBA backgrounds. It's a great program. It opens up a lot of opportunity for folks who otherwise might not be considering an MBA, but it is very much not always known.
The 2+2 program allows you, while you are still in undergrad - towards the end of your senior year - to have taken the GMAT and to apply to HBS. A few other schools do this as well. If you get in, you have guaranteed admission two years later. The idea is two years of work experience and then two years to do your MBA. However, you can stretch that work experience timeline.
Was there any commitment you needed to make at the time - financial or otherwise?
I honestly don't remember if there was a financial commitment - we're stretching back about 15 years. If there was, it wasn't significant; it would have been in the range of a thousand dollars or so, not a large percentage of the tuition. It may or may not have been required. I would check the website for details.
The program does guarantee you an admission spot for anywhere from two to four years after you are accepted. You can't go earlier than two years and you can't go later than four years, but they do encourage people to get as much work experience as possible. After two years of deferring, I felt like I did not have enough work experience. I was evolving my thesis - what I wanted to work on in life - and I needed two more years to continue to evolve that and figure out how to actually make the most of the MBA once I did it. I'm really glad I took all four years and would absolutely recommend that for anyone doing it.
It is a very nice thing to have and does provide a safety net for you in those first two to four years of your career where you can try things out, be experimental, and have the privilege of knowing that you can go back to business school and really change things - or continue to double down on a certain path you've started once you're there.
The biggest pivot I was thinking about was that I wasn't sure if I wanted to do an MBA. By the time I'd started to think about job development and creating economic opportunity, I was starting to think a lot more about a master's in public policy and how learning about public policy or public administration might play into that for my career. So I did actually look at HKS, or going to a public policy school instead of the MBA. I weighed pretty heavily in that fourth year of my deferral whether I actually wanted to go do the MBA or whether I wanted to go down a completely different path professionally.
Is it an option, if you've already been accepted into the 2+2, to at a later point apply to HKS to do a dual degree?
Yes, it definitely is an option. I applied to it. I didn't get into the HKS side of things, so I was disappointed by that, but it did seal the decision for me that, well, I guess I'm going to HBS because that is where I have gotten in. Frankly, I was excited at that point that I could maybe be at Harvard, be in that ecosystem, and connect and do some things with HKS and with some of the other grad schools even without being a student there, which I did end up doing through a lot of the extracurricular stuff I did. So it worked out in the end, but I was disappointed because I did want to do that dual degree program. You do have the option of applying to it, but it is treated like a separate admissions process, so you're evaluated competitively just like all the other applicants.
By the fourth year, I was like, well, it's now or never, so I don't really have a choice in it. And I'm glad I went at that point. I'm definitely glad I didn't go earlier.
At the two-year point, I was still figuring out who I was as a person. I was 23, so I was young. I didn't know what I wanted to do professionally. One of the biggest things I was trying to explore was what type of environment I like working in. Do I like working in a large corporate company? Do I like working in a startup or an entrepreneurial space? And until I had more information on that, I didn't feel like I could go into an MBA and actually set a direction for myself and make use of the resources that were there, make the most of my time, figure out what I wanted to learn.
One of the great things about an MBA is that it is so broad that you can pursue a lot of different things within it. I knew that, so I knew I needed to be a bit more focused on what I wanted to explore while I was at the MBA. I wanted to have a specific thesis that I wanted to work on. I wanted to have some target of people that I wanted to get to know, a network I wanted to build, an area that I wanted to learn more about for my future career. And I felt two years in that I had no idea what I wanted to do with that.
One advantage of applying through 2+2 is that you're actually in study mode - you're in test-taking mode while you're still in college. So it felt natural to fit that in. I distinctly remember going to my college library and hiding in the silent corner and doing all of my GMAT practice tests in there. There was a pretty natural environment for that, and I think it would have been a lot harder to carve out time for that had I been in the working world.
It was still a challenge, especially the math section of the GMAT. As an engineer, I pride myself on being really good at math, but it's just like SAT math - it's not standard math that you're doing by the time you're in advanced calculus in college. You really have to learn how to take the test for the test questions' sake. That took a lot of practice, a lot of training myself on what their questions would be. I remember sitting around my living room with some of my roommates my senior year, not being able to figure out a question about geometry. I threw it out to all of my roommates, and one of them - who was in a completely design-based background, so she wasn't doing the same kind of math that I was doing in college - got the answer incredibly quickly. She was like, "Oh yeah, this is how the triangle works." I was so glad to have a network of friends and people who could help me figure out the math I wasn't able to figure out myself while studying for the GMAT.
The second biggest challenge was figuring out what your narrative was going to be in the essay and how you were going to present yourself. One of the biggest pieces of advice I got from folks as I was thinking about applying was to really know what value you could bring to the classroom and what voice you were going to represent in the environment of an HBS case classroom. The advice was that HBS really looks to make a holistic classroom setting - they like to have people that come from different points of view and that share those different perspectives during the case studies. That made me have to figure out what was that perspective, what was that voice that I was going to bring that could be unique to me or could be a complement to the holistic setting that HBS was trying to create in the classroom. That definitely took some effort. That was a challenge, especially as a college student - you're still figuring yourself out, you're still learning your own voice. To have to understand what your perspective on the world is and what you want to contribute, that was a challenge.
The thing that helped the most was really just deciding not to overthink it.
I talked a lot with my family. I'm very close with my parents, so my mom was a great support in the process - helping me draft out essays, talk through questions, and practice for that. I also got to talk to some alumni from my college scholarship program who were at HBS, and just talking to them, understanding what their voice was, what they had seen in the classroom at HBS, and what those different voices could be helped me a lot. Those resources were very supportive.
Understanding that if I applied through 2+2, the voice I applied as might not be the same as the voice I came into school with four years later - which it absolutely wasn't. There were aspects that were similar, but there were aspects that were completely different after those four years. Once I accepted that and decided, okay, I'm going to give the voice I can best give and best represent based on my skills and experiences right now, and I'm going to go with that - and if it changes down the line, that's okay.
The female engineer piece definitely helped. That was the angle I tried to play up as a voice, and my understanding at the time was that HBS was trying to attract more candidates like female engineers through the 2+2 program specifically. I almost felt like I was the target audience for the 2+2 program. I'm obviously not on the admissions team, so I don't know what the truth is behind that, but I felt like that helped me - that I was a candidate who otherwise might not have thought about an MBA, and that was really who they wanted to come in through the 2+2 program.
The one other thing I did that I think probably helped me stand out was I actually did not write a traditional personal essay statement. I wrote a version of two truths and a lie, but I did eight truths and two lies, or something like that. I wrote a list of facts about myself, made it a game, and then wrote a short essay summarizing why I did that. I think that definitely helped me stand out because it was very different. I was really in the mindset that because it was 2+2, I could be a little riskier. I was trying hard to do something that would stand out. I wrote out ten different statements about myself that were all really unique, different things. They didn't summarize to one specific narrative, but they showed a holistic, well-rounded aspect of myself - things I thought were unique and interesting. Looking back, I thought that was a big risk to take. It worked out. Not sure I could advise applying that more broadly, but I definitely took a gamble on how I was writing my personal statement.
It showed me what are all the different aspects of myself, my personality, and my history that I'm proud of - the things I like, that I've done, that I want to show off in a statement. And they were totally disparate, all over the place. When you write that down, you can then think about whether there is a common thread or a theme, or whether you want to show off that you have differing parts of your personality, things that conflict, things that point in different directions - and that's all okay, because that makes you a whole, unique, and interesting human being.
Did you actually reveal to them the two lies?
I didn't call out what they were, but they were so obvious that if they had been true, it would have come through in other ways. One of them was something like "I'm a Nobel Prize winner" - something so ridiculous that it was obvious what the lie was - but I didn't actually write it on the piece of paper. I left that up for them to figure out.
I mostly chose professors. I had two different professors, and then I also had the leader of my scholarship program that I was in through college, because I had worked with him really closely on some conferences and events in a leadership role, so he had that professional perspective on me.
Not many people have that much work experience at that point, but being able to show some of the professional experience is really great. They're aware that you're applying through college, so they don't expect the same thing they expect from folks who've been working for years. They spell out pretty clearly in the guidelines that recommendations can come from professors - think about people that you've interacted with in clubs or activities at school. So it didn't feel too overwhelming to try to figure out who to get the recommendations from.
I would probably look more at other schools. I honestly didn't. I didn't even know if 2+2 existed at other schools, and I was doing it as a shot in the dark - let's apply to Harvard, why not, see where it goes. I didn't think about whether I should explore other places and try to compare and weigh the options of different schools. So by the time it came time to apply and actually decide whether I was going four years later, I didn't have an option to weigh. I wasn't weighing why I liked HBS over another school. I was really just weighing do I want to go to HBS and get an MBA, or do I not. I would have liked to have a little bit more to consider about different schools and compare side by side.
Our business school experience was interrupted by COVID, so non-traditional in that sense. The best thing I did and that I really appreciated came along with that interruption. I mentioned before that I went into it wanting to interact with some of the other graduate schools at Harvard, specifically the Kennedy School for Public Policy. When COVID hit, I came across a program with the Harvard Project on Workforce - a collaboration between HBS, HKS, and the Graduate School of Education, led by professors across all three of those schools, really focused on the mission of how do we set workers up for the future of work? How do we provide upskilling educational opportunities to create better job options for folks in the workforce? That hit the nail on the head of what I wanted to do at that point.
It not only fit into the space I wanted to work in, narrative and thesis wise, but it also gave me the chance to collaborate and get to know students and professors from some of the other Harvard graduate schools. I started to work with them really closely on this project. We called it Skillbase at the time, and we built an online platform that was a free marketplace of programs where workers who were at home from COVID - recently laid off or just not going into the office like they used to - could spend time upskilling and learning different foundational skills across English language, digital skills, and professional skills that they could use. The thought behind it was that if we help folks practice these skills while they have extra time during COVID, they can set themselves up for more job opportunities once the world reopens.
That was an incredible project that really helped me narrow down the focus of what I wanted to do in my career long term. There was a team of about six of us that worked on it from April 2020 all the way through the end of my HBS career. The program continued after I graduated - they had people still continuing to work on it - and the Harvard Project on Workforce continued to expand and grow, bringing in a lot more students to do research projects, events, and activities, and doing partnerships and projects with various people in the nonprofit space and the public sector. That was one of the best things I got to experience at HBS.
One myth or challenge for me was navigating how many people you're supposed to build relationships with at HBS. There's a really big myth that you're going to network with as many people as possible, and that really just doesn't fit my personality and my style. I really love small group interactions and forming deep relationships with a few people. I didn't love the 90-person gatherings pre-COVID, and I actually feel like I benefited a lot from the fact that COVID narrowed down the number of people we could interact with. That helped me form some closer, deeper relationships with people that I carry forward into my life. I probably have a less broad network, but deeper relationships from it, and I really value that.
It was definitely a myth I had to reckon with and figure out during the first semester: Am I supposed to be getting to know every single person in this 900-person class? How much can I really form relationships with them? Am I not making the most of my time here if I don't become friends with all 900 people? What does it actually look like? It ended up working out, and ultimately, thanks to COVID, that myth was dispelled pretty quickly.
People who got their MBA will say the way they did it is the right way to do it, and it's not - it's about what you want to get out of it and whether you took the time to make sure you got what you needed. One of the great things about HBS is that it is such a large class, so there are so many people doing it in their own ways, and there's no one right way to do it.
I was looking for a job in the social sector career development workforce space, but what that would look like was completely unknown. I was very problem-oriented in the type of work I wanted to do. I wanted to work on the problem of job creation, but that doesn't translate to a direct job, so that made searching really difficult.
I had a lot of conversations with alumni, which was wonderful. Using the HBS network, I would just reach out to people with the email address, and so many people responded. My first year, really through the fall and spring, I had lots of one-on-one conversations with different alumni, asking them about their career paths in the public sector, the workforce space, anything along those lines. I applied to several different kinds of internships for my first year - thought about the consulting path, thought about social sector jobs, even thought about different government agencies.
At the end of HBS, I pursued the Leadership Fellows Program, which I'll put in a plug for because it was a really fantastic program. The Leadership Fellows Program at HBS provides specific job opportunities for graduates to go into public sector or social sector jobs, and HBS handpicks what those roles are. They make sure that you're getting a level of impact and access within the organization to really make a difference and use your MBA skills in a way that's valuable to that organization. They also help make sure that you're getting a salary that's comfortable for you coming out of business school, knowing most students have debt. It's a really solid program, and I got to benefit from that by going to the city of Detroit and working in the mayor's office through the Leadership Fellows Program.
It was honestly my dream job. I don't think I ever would have made it to a job like that if it weren't for the Leadership Fellows Program at HBS. I got to work with the mayor, with the COO, and really deliver special projects related to workforce and economic opportunity that I thought could help make a difference for the residents of Detroit. I had a fantastic time there doing that - very proud of the work I got to do and grateful for that opportunity.
The Leadership Fellows Program is a one-year structured program. They provide that job for a year, and that's ultimately where the program ended. I then looked for a new full-time job after that and moved out to the Bay Area, where my partner was at the time. I'm now working for a startup called Forage that provides job simulations to students to help them learn about different career paths and, ultimately, hopefully help them get hired by large companies. We create these simulations for big companies - anyone like BCG, JP Morgan, Pepsi, lots of different companies - and we hope to be a recruiting tool that those companies will use to hire students who come through these programs because they're higher intent. They understand what the job is, and they've gotten a chance to really experiment and show off their skills in that space.
I definitely applied it in terms of the way to break down problems and structure recommendations, as well as how to communicate to leaders and tie together their different motivations and a solution that you might be presenting - and pitch it towards what you know they need and what's most important to them. That was a skill that was frankly very valued within the City of Detroit's office. It's not always valued in the public sector, and I think one of the reasons the City of Detroit has done some really great work is that it has a leader and a team of folks that value that kind of skill set and that allow folks to get work done when they do approach it from an analytical perspective, from a very business-oriented mindset.
I used the skills creating presentations, running analysis, and being able to then go show the mayor. One of the big projects I did was raising the minimum wage for all city employees up to $15 an hour, and I had to do a ton of Excel analysis for that. I did not have that Excel experience before HBS, but I had to really practice and use those Excel skills that I had been developing in the finance classes and those modeling experiences at HBS to actually run the analysis and get the data done so that I could convince the mayor and ultimately the budget team in the Office of the Chief Financial Officer that this was a financially sound decision for them to make as a city. So I definitely applied the business skills there.
I actually met my partner at HBS - that was completely unintentional, did not plan to do that, but it definitely keeps me connected to the HBS community because that's now the person I'm building a life with long term.
Definitely through WhatsApp groups and communication with a lot of friends who are in different places. Now that I'm in San Francisco, there's a solid contingency of friends and people here from HBS. When I was in Detroit, there was one other HBS grad from our year - I was very connected with him and his wife, we hung out a lot and got to spend time together, so it was a very nice immediate connection. There are definitely more people here in San Francisco.
Be comfortable in your own skin and know who you are. It's okay to be who you are, even if you're not the traditional MBA candidate applying, or even if you're not when you're there. There are so many different opportunities. Business schools are really broad degrees by nature, and you can take that and spin it in any way you want. Be comfortable and confident in that, and don't feel like there's only one right way to make the most out of it.
So many things happen. Life changes. You're absolutely entitled to change your own mind, change your path, change how you want to approach different things, and be okay with that. Just don't overthink it. Don't worry too much about doing it in the right way. Know that you'll end up being able to apply things no matter what route you go down. Business schools are a better place for having people that come from a lot of different perspectives and are able and confident to show that.