We’d like to announce and welcome the new Global Initiatives leadership team. We have a great team this year full of awesome ideas and lots of excitement. Please read about each of the VP roles below and their ideas for the upcoming year!

VP of Careers – Paul Javid and Thomas McMennamin

The Careers team would like to help formalize the Global Initiatives career-path trajectory. This would involve two steps: 1) Categorizing available post-MBA jobs that are of interest to GI (interest to be gauged with a survey) into buckets (non-profit, social enterprise, CSR, etc.), and 2) building cross-collaborative teams with VPs of Careers from other clubs. Each of the interested VPs would take a bucket or two, and work on building a portfolio of companies, contacts, and post-mba career options available. Additionally, we will work on educating ourselves and our respective clubs on the industry, the companies, the interview process, and what those companies look for in likely candidates.

VP of Global Outreach – Cindy Chen and Abhay Nihalani

The main priority of Global Outreach will be in expanding the footprint of the burgeoning Global Initiatives brand across Haas, the broader Berkeley campus, the Bay Area and eventually across our network of like-minded of business schools. We’d like to ensure that current and incoming students recognize this club not only as a social outlet for their interests, but as a pillar of support and education for them in pursuit of their career aspirations in international development and social enterprise. Without a holistic awareness, we cannot hope to serve communities and make the impact that is needed. Outreach will make sure that we are at the forefront of the well-spring of social enterprise and international development events taking place in the Bay Area, and ensure that our local professional community begin to look forward to seeing Haas students participating and playing an active role in these events. We are uniquely positioned in the epicenter of innovation in this space and I hope to facilitate our continued interaction with this hurricane of activity.

VP of Community – Deb Agrin

The goal for Community next year is to connect students within Haas to their interests as well as their peers, to bridge the gap between business students and other graduate students, and to forge relationships with professionals in the field. In order to build a cohesive GIH community, the emphasis will be on holding social events in line with member’s interests throughout the year such as:

• Monthly industry-themed group dinners (eg. Microfinance, International Development, Global Education

• Monthly current events breakfast roundtable discussions

VP of Thought Leadership – Ian Hepworth and Purabi Thakre

The main objective of Thought Leadership is to engage our members in enriching and thought provoking mode of learning by facilitating interaction with industry experts, practitioners and champions for social impact. As we move into the next year we are committed to strengthen this philosophy of engaging powerful thought leaders from industry to inspire students to ideate and implement solutions for maximizing sustainable social impact.  Going forward, for the next year, we hope to diversify our speaker series offering to include resource management, infrastructure creation and sustainable partnerships for developing economies.

We believe in the power of collaboration and value inputs from the entire student community in enabling us to meet their expectations to the best of our ability.

Co-Presidents – Daniella Maor and Emily Smith

Global Initiatives was established to bring together students from all areas of study with a common interest in international development. There are unlimited possibilities and approaches to development as we become an increasingly global society – engineering, energy, financing, education, business and more. There is huge potential at an institution like UC Berkeley to create an extraordinary community of people who can make amazing changes. As co-president of Global Initiatives we aim to foster this incredible community, allow us to learn as much possible, and enable us all to make a positive international impact. Global Initiatives is an incredible community of people with amazing ideas and interests. We are dedicated to promoting awareness of the group around campus, building our community, and sharing ideas that will build our ability to impact change internationally through school and after graduation.