As a middle schooler, Lailah Thompson-Woode (MBA 2021) dreamt of being a CEO of a multinational corporation. She even dressed the part, going to school in a pantsuit. But the path to the corner office is often an expensive one. Thompson-Woode learned this as a high schooler in Brooklyn when she wanted to attend a 10-day student engineering conference at the University of California. The $5,000 cost was beyond her family’s means, but Thompson-Woode’s mother decided she would ask the community to invest in her daughter’s dream. “The city raised the money,” Thompson-Woode says. “People wanted to see this Black girl do engineering and wouldn’t let money be an obstacle.” The experience helped shape her focus as she later pursued her career. “Being able to help my community—that’s what I’ve always wanted to do.”

Engineering was the first step for Thompson-Woode. A first-generation college student, she earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and a master’s in management through a dual-degree program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute before applying to HBS’s 2+2 Program, which admits college students to the MBA Program on a deferred basis, giving them time to gain professional experience before beginning classroom study.

Thompson-Woode was excited for the opportunity, spending three years as a manufacturing manager at Frito-Lay, but apprehensive about the cost of the MBA Program. “Everyone in my neighborhood and my community was so excited and I was just freaking out: ‘How am I going to pay for this?’” she recalls asking herself.

To ease that burden, HBS made an investment in Thompson-Woode. Alongside traditional financial aid, which included fellowships and loans, Thompson-Woode was awarded the Forward Fellowship, a $30,000, two-year grant designed to assist students from lower-income backgrounds who are also helping to support their families. “That meant everything,” she says. At the time she began her classes at HBS, Thompson-Woode had a one-year-old daughter and was helping her parents through financial difficulties as she had been doing since high school.

HBS established the Forward Fellowship in 2018 with the support of John C. Phelan (MBA 1990) to ensure that students such as Thompson-Woode could access the MBA Program. Donors who choose to support fellowships at HBS were often recipients of financial aid as well and are driven by their desire to pay it forward for others. In addition to being the beneficiary of the Forward Fellowship, Thompson-Woode received the Barbara and Edmund A. Hajim (MBA 1964) Fellowship for students who are first in their family to attend college. She says it meant a lot “just to know it’s possible. To know you’re not the first person doing this and that you’re not alone.”

Throughout her time at HBS, Thompson-Woode committed herself to convincing others that a business education is not out of reach. Even as she was preparing for exams at HBS—and raising her first child (she and her husband are now the parents of two)—she would share the lessons she was learning in the MBA Program with others, offering her notes and insights to entrepreneurs and aspiring business people via Facebook and LinkedIn and through community outreach in Boston. “A lot of these things are taught in a bubble,” Thompson-Woode says. “I’m one of the few to break through, and I’m making sure I pass on that knowledge I’ve gained at HBS.”

Thompson-Woode is now working as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group. She’s studied the careers of women executives in Fortune 500 companies—the women who have held the jobs she has aspired to since childhood—and is following in their footsteps toward the goal which has remained unchanged since her early teens: “I want to give back to my community,” Thompson-Woode explains.

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