Photo by Will Kirk / Johns Hopkins University

Raised in a small town in Ohio, Nancy Hall came to HBS as a partner when her husband entered the MBA Program. When they separated a few years later, she applied to the School “on a lark” and got in. The first day of kindergarten for her daughter, Lara, was Hall’s first day at HBS.

I was on campus last year for a Social Enterprise Initiative event. Sitting at a table with several women who were current MBA students, I was surprised when they introduced themselves to each other. When I was at HBS, there were only fifty women on campus, and we all knew each other.

The focus was on corporate business when I graduated. We were trained to work in established companies that had tens of thousands of employees. We didn’t spend much time on international business or study nonprofit management. Entrepreneurship was a novel idea. Now, it is very clear that all of these areas are important to understand.

My first jobs were in retailing, on the finance side. Thirteen years after HBS, I had a midlife crisis. I was working for a soon-to-be defunct department store in Baltimore and knew it was time to get out. I left my job to explore other options — to “find myself.” At the time, I was president of the board of the local YWCA and decided to come in once a week to help out. I soon realized that nonprofits could really use the skills I had — finance, marketing, planning. I saw that many nonprofits didn’t know who their customers and competition were. I knew I could help. Within a year I was consulting to a dozen health and human-services organizations, two of which I still work with today.

In addition, I work part-time for the Maryland Association of Nonprofit Organizations running an insurance program. At Johns Hopkins, I teach a survey course in nonprofit management and a nonprofit finance course.

I’m not a leader, but I am a good manager, and I can make decisions. I like to affiliate myself with smart, dynamic people who are creative. I like to make things happen, but I don’t need to be there when they hand out awards.

My advice to today’s students is to be flexible and read everything. There’s so much predigested information out there, but that’s not where creativity comes from. There’s much more to life than what goes on in the classroom or the boardroom.

And yet, the classroom is important. I still use what I learned from Ron Frank in Managerial Economics and from Ted Levitt in Marketing. When I’m teaching my students — who are interested in changing the world — I know that what they learn will stay with them for years. It’s an incredibly satisfying feeling. — SY

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