Lara Apstein (MiM‘24) on Building Community and Growing a Global Mindset

This story is part of the Student Voices series, which provides a firsthand perspective of the student experience at Georgetown McDonough.

Lara Apstein (MiM’24) is a student in the M.S. in Management (MiM) program. Here, she reflects on her favorite memories from the past year, her favorite courses, and what she plans to do after she crosses the Commencement stage in May. 

Why I Chose Georgetown

My name is Lara Apstein and I’m (sadly, no longer) a student in the MiM program at the McDonough School of Business. Hailing from Argentina and having lived in Switzerland and England for over nine years combined, I was looking forward to taking the next step in my education. The Georgetown MiM program offered a space where I could develop hard analytical skills to complement the soft skills I acquired in the working world, while experiencing a new country, city, and building a lifelong community. 

The experience has been better than I could have imagined. Even though I believed I came into Georgetown with a strong set of soft skills, classes like Leadership Communication taught me how to present and feel more confident in front of an audience. Beyond that, I learned statistical tools such as R, which I didn’t even know existed.

Over the past 10 months, my favorite memory from Georgetown takes me back to the first week of class to the makeshift boat race. Working in teams that we would eventually spend the first half of the year with, we were tasked with making a “boat” out of balloons, tape, trash bags, and cardboard boxes that we raced against the other teams. Blue Team 4 may not have won the final race but we won for team spirit – we were cheering, celebrating, and having the best time, a precursor for what was to come.  

Global Coursework and Experiences 

A great professor will make you love any course, even the most unexpected ones. This was the case with Operations and Global Supply Chain Management. Learning about Lean and Six Sigma may not be the reason some of us came to Georgetown, but it definitely was one of the reasons we came to class. Professor Ricardo Ernst made the class so lively, interesting, applicable, and sometimes even comical. It was a pleasure coming to class and I will always have fond memories of it.

I also gained new global experiences through the MiM global consulting project. The Global Business Experience, which is the MiM capstone project, was wonderful and added significantly to the overall experience of the degree. Traveling to Dublin, Ireland was wonderful. Even though I had lived in England for the past seven years, I had never visited and it was all the more exciting going with Georgetown. In addition to our academic work, we were able to take trips, like to Kilkenny Castle. A particular favorite of mine was visiting the Teeling Distillery and being received by one of the founders, Stephen Teeling.

The capstone project, which was for the protein bar firm All Real Nutrition, was a great transition from a purely academic form of learning to a hands-on approach, while taking into account cultural differences in serving a client. This experience has immensely prepared me for the next stage of my career. 

Life Beyond the Hilltop

After graduation, I am moving to Austin, Texas, and will be working in corporate real estate at East Street Capital. I am looking forward to working again and bringing all of my experiences from Georgetown into the workplace. I will miss being on the East Coast but luckily, many of my friends will be staying here so there will always be an excuse to come and visit.

As I close on my final weeks at Georgetown McDonough, I am grateful for the experiences and memories I made along the way. To the next class of Georgetown students, enjoy every minute of it – it truly flies by. Make the best use of what campus has to offer – there are events and activities happening all around you. Most importantly, make good friends and good memories, get some merch, and go to at least one sports game. Hoya Saxa!

-Lara Apstein (MiM’24)