The best & brightest MBAs in the class of 2015

Katie Benintende was accustomed to being in the minority. As an undergrad, she majored in engineering, a traditionally male-dominated field. And she spent six years climbing the ranks in the Fortune 500, a place where women comprise just 14% of senior executives. When she decided to get an MBA, she picked the University of California-Berkeley due to the program’s “strong culture of diversity and inclusion.”

Yet, when she arrived on the leafy Northern California campus in the summer of 2013, she soon learned something that shocked her. In her entering class, women comprised just 29% of the incoming students, a drop from 32% the previous year. It didn’t take long for Benintende, 30, to find a cause and her voice. She helped to launch an initiative that brought together students, faculty and alumni to increase female enrollment, a touchy issue on business school campuses where women typically comprise little more than a third of the MBA students.

Related: Poets & Quants full list of best and brightest MBAs

Undaunted, Benintende’s initiative enlisted classmates as ambassadors to talk up the school’s MBA program to other women, sponsored events to prospective female students, and persuaded high-powered female alumni and faculty to “close” women admits to get them to enroll. “I think we made enough noise to send a message that Haas lives up to its reputation for inclusion,” she now says. “After all that work, we were hoping to have an impact. Still, we were all stunned to learn that the incoming Class of 2016 exceeded all our expectations, with a record 43% women!”

A Wildly Diverse Group That Upends the Stereotype of Sharp-Elbowed MBAs

That unique accomplishment, helping to make Haas the business school with the highest percentage of women in a full-time, highly selective MBA program, is what catapulted Benintende onto Poets&Quants’ inaugural list of the 50 best and brightest MBA graduates this year. Like the other extraordinary MBAs on the list, Benintende distinguished herself by her demonstrated leadership, academic excellence, and personal qualities and contributions that resulted in real impact.

The best of the Class of 2015 is a rich and widely diverse group of talented young professionals who upend the stereotypes that MBAs are detached quants and sharp-elbowed climbers. They are former marines, athletes, actors and lawyers. They have managed charities just as often as they’ve worked on Wall Street – and some have done both. And perhaps the biggest surprise of all is that women form a solid majority of the 50 graduates on the list -- 27 women to the 23 men.

While some graduates are leaving to join popular destinations like McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, and Amazon, others are launching their own firms or heading overseas to fight disease and poverty. You’ll find these 50 MBAs hailing from locations as disparate as New Hampshire and the United Arab Emirates, with 15 students on the list born outside the United States. Although traditional powers like Harvard and Stanford are represented, you’ll find plenty of MBAs on the list who are graduating from public universities including Texas A&M, Purdue, Maryland, and Minnesota.

These Class of 2015 MBAS Exemplify the Best of the Lot

To compile this list, Poets&Quants surveyed 60 of the top-ranked full-time global MBA programs to find those 2015 graduates who “exemplify the best of your school.” Selected by administrators, faculty and fellow classmates, more than 100 forthcoming graduates were nominated. The staff of Poets&Quants then carefully evaluated the submissions for academic achievement, leadership in extracurricular involvement, immediate impact, and engaging personal narratives to come up with the best of the bunch—and what an exceptional group they are.

Consider the University of Southern California’s Jenny Dare Paulin, 31. She started out as an actor, nabbing bit parts in shows like Dawson’s Creek before enjoying a stint on Broadway. Eventually, she found herself working 16-hour days in a gourmet burger joint she had opened in Nicaragua. After returning to school, where she was dubbed a “Renaissance Woman” by her peers, this artist-turned-consultant eventually led 12 MBA students on a 10-month international consulting project. Here, the team’s research helped one Malaysian leader secure an additional $30 million for educational funding.

Heading to Ernst & Young after graduation, Dare Paulin has advice relevant to any poet fearing statistical models and finance. “Hard skills are important and useful, but perishable. The most important skills you can acquire in business school are the abilities to adapt, interpret and learn.”

Of course, poet types aren’t the only students making an impact at business school. MIT’s Elena Mendez-Escobar, 32, who holds a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, helped to develop “Breaking the Mold,” a series of events designed to spark conversations about unconscious bias and arm students with tools to overcome it.

UCLA’s Jacob Call, 34, has channeled his unforgiving Navy SEAL training to excel in both the classroom and his extracurricular activities, eventually landing a coveted position in investment banking.

And Michael Martin, 28, a Carleton College graduate from Rockport, Indiana, has emerged as one of Harvard Business School’s most decorated entrepreneurs. His RapidSOS solution, a wireless app that communicates location information to emergency response teams, recently earned first place at the Harvard Business School New Venture Competition and could potentially revolutionize 911 calls.

Business School: A Place for Re-Invention

Business school is considered a place for students to try on different hats, to explore, experiment, and even fail. It is a supportive, risk-free arena for MBAs to discover who they are and what they want.

The University of Maryland’s Nadine Payne, 42, is one student who used business school to change careers. A former attorney with the U.S. Justice Department, Payne initially struggled with both esoteric quant concepts and a highly collaborative culture driven by teams. But she quickly embraced the challenge. Payne stepped out of her comfort zone, taking on leadership roles in student clubs and volunteering to help run several campus events. In the process, she earned several accolades in case competitions and thrived in once-daunting finance courses (eventually securing a job with Citibank). Through her efforts, Payne earned the ultimate compliment from Vice Dean Joyce Russell: “She has touched numerous parts of our MBA program and in every case, has vastly improved what was in existence.”

And Payne wasn’t alone in re-inventing herself. Notre Dame’s Elizabeth Owens, 34, served several years in the United States’ Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), including stints in Iraq, as she rose to being a Senior Intelligence Officer (Think “Maya” from Zero Dark Thirty). Seeking to continue a life of purpose, Owens focused on re-tooling the school’s career services program to better fit the needs of the school’s MBAs.

Kevin Bentley, 35, who spent ten years as an NFL linebacker, has transitioned into being a senior consultant at Infosys after choosing Rice over 13 other schools.

Similarly, Ellen Gartner Phillips, 32, came to Indiana University as a music teacher. By the time she graduated, she was ranked in the top 1% of her class academically and had landed a job as a senior consultant in strategy and operations with Deloitte.

Business school is a time of transition, trial, and transformation. It’s a whirlwind of projects, trips, events, cases, and interviews that goes by before you know it. Once you look back on it, one thing is clear. You won’t believe just how much you accomplished in such a short time.

Congratulations, Class of 2015! You’ve earned it.