Summer Internship Spotlight: Mark Matsuura (MBA'19), Inspiring Capital

Each year, our students spend their summers in Washington, D.C., across the nation, and around the world working in corporate, nonprofit, and government organizations. This month, we’re featuring Full-time MBA students with particularly interesting summer internships.

Mark Matsuura (MBA’19)

MBA Consulting Fellow, Inspiring Capital
Durham, North Carolina

Inspiring Capital’s MBA Social Impact Fellowship is a competitive 10-week paid fellowship, pairing top MBA students with large social enterprises and mission-driven corporations to work on consulting projects to drive sustainable change. One cohort of fellows is located in New York, and the other is located in Durham, North Carolina.

What are you doing this summer?

As part of my fellowship, I’m providing consulting services for SHIFT NC (Sexual Health Initiatives for Teens). SHIFT NC is a nonprofit that provides training and technical assistance to health centers, juvenile detention facilities, school districts, and community-based health organizations. Widely known for its campaign to prevent teen pregnancy, the organization works broadly to promote access to evidence-based sexual health education and services. Although SHIFT NC has relied heavily on grant funding for over 30 years, the need to explore alternative revenue sources has never been greater. That’s where I come in. I’ve been tasked with developing a fee-for-service model that would allow the organization to charge for its services.

How does Inspiring Capital relate to your professional or personal interests?

Inspiring Capital provides consulting and training services to social sector clients, and I want to leverage my business background to make this world a better place. I strongly believe in the idea of doing purposeful work — work that contributes meaning to an individual’s life and has relevance to the greater community.

How did you find the internship?

I signed up for an on-campus information session through McDonough CareerView.

What’s the coolest thing you’ve done this summer?

Although Inspiring Capital fellows are split into two cohorts (New York and North Carolina), we spent the first week together training in New York. The schedule included a speaker series, design thinking workshop, guacamole challenge, improv class, scavenger hunt, and mindfulness exercises.

I appreciate that Inspiring Capital recruits a diverse cohort of fellows from a variety of different business schools. I’ve had the chance to meet students from Arizona State, Carnegie Mellon, Chicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgia, Harvard, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Virginia, and Yale.