From the beginning of her time at Duke, Margaret “Munny” Munford (Fuqua, ‘16) was warned that it would be easy to get swamped with extracurricular activities. Armed with a game plan and a desire to make positive contributions, Munny not only succeeded in securing a management consulting internship, but also made significant contributions to the Fuqua Community, particularly through her involvement as Co-President of FuquaPride and her involvement on the DIversity Working Committee. Munny shares with us her motivation for being so involved, and how being involved will help her in her professional career.
Coming in to Fuqua I was “warned” by a few of the second years about how easy it is to get swept up in extracurricular activities. I came to school with a very clear idea of why I was here, but a somewhat foggier idea of who I wanted to be at business school. So whittling down the clubs I was involved with wasn’t exactly an easy process. I encourage all incoming students to figure out an approach that works for them. My particular approach was to sign up on the club websites for nearly everything that interested me so that I could receive the weekly newsletters. That ended up being something like a dozen different clubs. Then, over the course of the first few months, I started to realize which club newsletters I deleted fastest. Those were the clubs I eventually dropped. My eventual goal was to have a focus of 1 or 2 clubs in three different areas: professional (Consulting Club), diversity (FuquaPride and Assoc. of Women in Business), and social/fun (Fuqua Vision). Much more than that becomes unruly and you can’t fully contribute as a member.
Throughout the course of my first-year, I realized which communities I wanted to be a meaningful contributor to. And seeking second-year leadership of those particular communities was inspired by wanting to make those particular clubs/communities better. I saw opportunity to improve upon what has been done before. I think that’s the most important part of club leadership — sign up to make things better, not just to put a feather in your cap. I encourage people to sign up or seek positions in places where they can make a real difference for others and the community, not just positions that will sound good on paper. It doesn’t matter how prestigious that position sounds if when a recruiter asks you about it, you can’t give an impassioned response to how you have demonstrated real leadership. Leadership isn’t demonstrated by a title, it’s demonstrated by action.
A good friend whom I admire approached me and asked me to run with him as Co-Presidents of FuquaPride. His pitch to me was, “I believe we can make this club better,” which was the best way to get me on board. I asked him what his particular vision for this year was and before I knew it, I was fully immersed in a strategy conversation. I realized then that I had a contribution to make.
Our work started before any actual election because we both wanted to ensure that LGBTQ-identified people applying to Fuqua realize how open and supportive the community can be. With the efforts of our fellow LGBTQ classmates, we ensured that a FuquaPride member was present on nearly every diversity panel for Admissions and that any inquiring prospective students got a quick and welcoming response from a current member. As a result, roughly 80% of the LGBTQ students who were admitted to Fuqua decided to accept. That sort of yield was a significant achievement for us and hopefully just the beginning of our work on improving this community. This year we hope to help build that community further through ally engagement — getting our ally friends to move beyond acceptance to real advocacy for LGBTQ students.
Creating a supportive environment is perhaps the overarching theme to the efforts I am involved with this year, including the Diversity Working Group. Fuqua is remarkably friendly and supportive, and yet all communities can be better about understanding and leveraging our collective diversity. Diversity is a wildly uncomfortable topic for many people. But I believe that the conversation around perceptions and expectations is an invaluable one. The ability to have that conversation demonstrates both emotional intelligence and the humility to learn from others. Those are perhaps two skills that nearly every job requires and yet no business school can really teach in the classroom. They are skills that I benefited from this past summer and that I believe make the real difference for employers.
I can’t emphasize enough how important emotional intelligence and service are to the concept of leadership. In undergrad, you become the leader of an organization largely because you are organized. Being organized is an important aspect of running a club, but it doesn’t demonstrate or build leadership abilities. I believe that graduate school provides a safe environment to push beyond that “organizing” mindset. Continually ask yourself, “How am I making things better for others than they were (or are) for me?” You can improve things from any angle or position. Titles are irrelevant to the actual difference that you make. Those lines on your resume that indicate club involvement aren’t there to impress your interviewer, they are there to give your interviewer fodder for behavioral questions. They don’t care about the title; employers care about your actual involvement, passion, and action to create change in your community. Something a partner at an MBB firm told me during my second round interview really struck me: if all employers cared about was having the smartest (in a traditional academic sense) people, they’d only interview people with the highest GPA or GMAT. But that no longer cuts it in today’s interconnected world. Employers want emotionally intelligent leaders — people who can listen to, learn from, engage, and inspire the teams they work with.
So figure out which communities you care most about and then ask yourself how you can make them better. That effort cannot be a one-person initiative. You have to engage your classmates to enable and inspire them to help make those changes. In the end, collaboration demonstrates leadership far more than that 8-point font title on your resume ever will.