Valerie Bockstette: I have an MBA. My career track is a little bit untraditional or maybe traditional.

Andrea M Kimmel: I think we live in an environment where careers evolve, and career interests evolve. And I think I wanted a degree that would help my career evolve with my changing interests.

Whitney Guston: For me, the opportunity to go to business school was not only to meet amazing people and really expand my network but also to be able to work effectively with people who are experts in finance.

Elissa Sangster: Hello. And welcome to the Career Lab podcast. Earlier this month, Career Lab traveled to Boston for an evening of panel discussions, networking and workshops at Harvard business school. Our speakers represented just some of the many options open to women in business today. Valerie Bockstette is a consultant at FSG Social Impact Advisors, a nonprofit consulting firm dedicated to philanthropy and corporate social responsibility. She talked about the growing career opportunities in the world of social enterprise.

Valerie: So we help foundations such as the Gates foundation or for example a community foundation such as the Boston Foundation, or corporations that are focused on corporate social responsibility. Figure out how to best invest their resources and who to give money to, how to measure the success of those grants. I have an MBA, My career track is a little bit untraditional or maybe traditional. I graduated from Brown in 2000 and majored in International Relations but decided to become an investment banker so I worked on Wall Street for three years doing mergers and acquisitions work then came to Harvard business school to get my MBA, specifically to transition into the nonprofit sector. Graduated from HBS in 2005 and spent two years at a small nonprofit consulting firm in Boston working as its managing director, and just recently transitioned to FSG.

HBS is actually a wonderful institution in terms of what they call social enterprise. There are a number of classes at HBS on the academic side so my second year half the classes I enrolled in were actually taught at HBS and focused on different topics of nonprofit management. There’s a very strong social enterprise club on campus and there is a program called Leadership Fellows, which I participated in, which funded me for my first year in the nonprofit sector so it paid half the salary so that the nonprofit could afford someone like an HBS grad.

Elissa: Careers in the nonprofit world are often seen as a trade-off, sacrificing money for intangible rewards. Valerie talked about what drew her to the nonprofit world.

Valerie: It’s just that joy of knowing that what you’re doing is valuable and that presumably you are not working for a nonprofit whose cause you believe in. So to know that you’re contributing to that cause every day, even on frustrating days, is very important. I think the other thing that I’d just touch on is you’ve got so much more responsibility when you work for a nonprofit because their nonprofits are so resource constrained you probably have two or three jobs at the same time. You may or may not notice that, but you will understand how an organization runs from top to bottom.

You may have to wear the accountant hat one