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Working on the Local Level
Aaron Chadbourne (JD/MBA 2010) accepted an offer from Maine’s governor to put his MBA to work tackling some of his home state’s toughest issues—from high taxes and an aging population to business development.
In this video, he explains why he chose public service over a corporate career path:
“What I've always gotten excited about is finding really difficult problems and working hard on new and creative solutions, bringing together resources and bringing together people to try to tackle hard and challenging problems.
“Coming out of Harvard Business School, you're given a lot of opportunities to go work in New York or to work globally. For me, the thing that I found missing was my connection to the areas where I was working on these challenging issues. For me, I've always known that I wanted to be back in Maine. The governor made me an offer and said, ‘I'm going to work as hard as I can to shake up the status quo and stop doing business as usual, because it hasn't been working. I need all of the help I can get. Would you be interested?’ I jumped at the opportunity.
“There's something very invigorating about not just going the traditional path that a Harvard MBA goes and making money in New York, but going home where I care about the communities that are going to see the impact of the work that I'm doing. The state of Maine is facing some real, serious challenges. We have a demographics challenge; we have the oldest state in the country by median age. Maine has one of the highest income taxes in the country. It's a particular challenge when we try to get either companies or professionals to locate in Maine.
“It's an exciting time to be working in a state. I think the federal government right now is experiencing a lot of gridlock. It's up to the states right now to be solution-oriented, solution-minded. If you see yourself as a problem solver or a policy entrepreneur and you want to do the work that helps people, being at the local level right now affords you great opportunity to have real impact.”
(Published September 2015)
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