FIRST GENERATION HARVARD MBA IS LIVING THE
AMERICAN DREAM By Seb Murray
Harvard MBA Michelle Millar came from a low-income background in inner-city Cleveland, Ohio. She uses her business skills to improve schools across the US. Read her exclusive remarkable story here!
Michelle Millar is a first-generation African American. She is the first person in her family to study at college and comes from a low- income, working class background. She has overcome the extreme challenge of prevailing in a world where networking and family connections are synonymous with success. Now, she is about to begin studying at Harvard Business School, a linchpin of the MBA education world.
Michelle has benefited from a number of social impact programs. Her roots can be traced back to her grandparents, who moved to inner- city Cleveland, Ohio with her mother. “My Nana made it very clear that if you get a good education, you won’t have to struggle,” Michelle tells me after class at Harvard.
“We lived with her from the age of four until she passed away when I was eleven. She worked as a maid and a Nanny for a family that owned a jewellery factory. She saw that the schools in the inner-city were not good quality, so she saved enough money for me to move to a middle- class neighbourhood.
“They wanted me to get a quality education, and that gave me the opportunities to be where I am now.”
Harvard is the number-one ranked business school in the world and it is an institution held in the deepest regard in the academic world; Harvard University is an entity in the US, founded 375 years ago and consistently associated with academic excellence. So it is surprising to hear that her mom, who is very proud of Michelle, at first didn’t understand the scale of her daughter’s achievement. “Because it’s not her world, she doesn’t realise how good Harvard is,” Michelle continues.
“She wasn’t even surprised when I got in, and she didn’t realise how important it was until she mentioned it to a neighbour on the street and they made a big deal out of it.”
I have no doubt that Michelle will join the ranks of a long list of successful Harvard MBAs once she graduates in 2016. She has achieved so much already. In 2009, she graduated from The Ohio State University with a BSBA in Accounting, a degree which she completed with a full scholarship from the Land Grant Opportunity scholars, an initiative for students from low income families. The National Black MBA Association also sponsored her $1000. In 2006, she worked for Nestlé and won a Diversity Scholarship from Ernst & Young, the prestigious consultancy firm, in 2008.
Michelle has worked as an Audit Intern at KPMG, the National City Bank in Ohio and, in 2011, as a Management Consultant Analyst for
Accenture for almost two years. She has benefited from a raft of diversity and other social enterprise initiatives.
But her childhood was a world away from the success she has achieved later on in life. While most school children were concerned with their social standing, Michelle was forced to set goals from an early age. She feels responsible for her family, who have given her so much, and she still helps them financially today. “When you’re a kid you can have a hard time fitting in at school,” she reflects. “I was living in the suburbs but wasn’t quite in the middle-class income level. I had the mind-set through school and college that I was so disadvantaged.
“I used to see my friends get cars when they turned sixteen. I got a free lunch at school, and a simple thing like not being able to buy a drink at the vending machine, having to drink a free carton of milk while your friends buy their lunches every day, made me so motivated to want to do so well at school.”
Michelle’s passion comes across in an ecstatic yet lugubrious fashion. Although studying an MBA, her true motivation is to help children and schools that are less fortunate than she was. She cares about poverty alleviation and educational policy, and it is no surprise to hear that she began her career with Teach for America – a non-profit organization that seeks to eliminate educational in-equality by enlisting recent college graduates and professionals to teach in public schools across America. She was based in Houston, Texas where she taught at an elementary school.
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