Giving Compass' Take:

• Two Harvard Business School graduates discuss their summer semesters at Consulting for Impact, a program that incorporates business concepts into design thinking processes for start-up ideas. 

• This class exemplifies the future of applied learning. Students were able to think through ideas and then pitch original concepts for start-ups to local business owners. How will this type of engaged and interactive learning help college students for the future workforce? What soft skills are they gaining from classes like these? 

• Read about how social entrepreneurship comes with challenges such as accessing early capital. 

After two years at HBS (and for Kaitlin, an additional year at HKS), we wanted to take some of the many ideas and concepts we had spent hours learning and pay it forward. Both of us are interested in a career in education, and when we learned about Freedom Summer Collegiate through HBS’ pro-bono consulting group, Consulting for Impact, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spend a month learning with high school students and (hopefully) getting them excited about becoming business leaders.

Over the past four weeks, students in our class learned about Finance, Accounting, Marketing, Leadership, Negotiations, and Strategy by reading HBS cases, just like at HBS.

To apply the lessons they learned through cases, students used the design thinking process to design products for their own startups. This included trips to the mall for customer interviews and we have to brag that they were much more fearless than most of our HBS classmates during FGI customer interviews.

While students have been learning about business, we’ve experienced the ups and downs of learning how to teach. When do we push everyone to read another page? How many times is too many to reinforce what COGS is? Finally, how do we keep everyone excited and engaged while tackling challenging case readings? Just as in an HBS case, it seems like there is rarely one right answer, but we both agree that our appreciation for our HBS professors and earlier teachers has grown with each day.

Read the full article about social enterpreneurship by Alex Landon & Kaitlin KlaustermeierAlumni at Harvard Business School