Five MBA students selected for academic achievement and demonstrated leadership.
An educational technologist, a finance whiz seeking to solve social problems, a JD/MBA candidate who is an expert on Jeopardy! bidding strategies, a hedge fund analyst who coauthored a scholarly article on pension accounting as an undergrad, and a math-econ scholar with a passion for entrepreneurship, have all been named 2013 Siebel Scholars at the Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB).
These five accomplished second-year MBA students join an elite group chosen by a faculty committee based on academic achievement and demonstrated leadership within the business school community during their first year. The honor includes a tuition grant, established in 2000 by the Siebel Foundation, to recognize the most talented students at the world’s leading graduate schools of business and computer science.
The five Stanford MBA students are: Greg Bybee, Krystal Cowan, Stewart Lynn, Blake Nesbitt, and Peter Shalek.
Greg Bybee
Greg Bybee
Greg is an avid education advocate seeking to leverage technology to make quality education accessible to all. While pursuing a joint MBA/MA in education, he has been active as an elected member of the Student Association Academic Committee, co-chair of the IT Committee, co-leader of the Stanford-Tsinghua Exchange Program, and a member of the Advisory Board for the Center for Global Business and the Economy. During the summer, he served as a product manager at Coursera, a global provider of free online courses. Prior to business school, he managed cloud computing product marketing at VMware and was a management consultant at McKinsey. A native of Wisconsin, he graduated with honors from Harvard University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences with a degree in applied mathematics and economics.
Krystal Cowan
Krystal Cowan
In her time at Stanford GSB Krystal has co-chaired the Student Association’s International Committee and served as a member of the Student Association Senate and vice president of the Social Innovation Club. She is also an MBA Admissions Ambassador. During the summer she interned with an investments team at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation seeking to leverage innovations in financing mechanisms to help solve social problems. Prior to business school, she worked for four years in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs in Australia, advising industrial consumer and retail companies. Raised in Penola, Australia, she holds Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Science degrees from the University of Melbourne, with majors in economics, finance, and genetics.
Stewart Lynn
Stewart Lynn
Stewart is in his final year of Stanford’s joint JD/MBA program. His on-campus involvement includes service as co-president of the JD/MBA Association, and as an editor of the Stanford Law Review. He is also an active member of the Entrepreneurship Club. Before starting at Stanford, he was a management consultant for six years, first at Bain & Company in Chicago and then at the Seabury Group where he had the opportunity to work on five continents. During the summer, he worked at a private equity firm in the Bay Area and advised an education technology startup. He graduated magna cum laude from the Mathematical Methods in Social Sciences (MMSS) honors program at Northwestern University where he wrote his thesis on Jeopardy! bidding strategies.
Blake Nesbitt
Blake is CEO of the student newspaper GSB Reporter and was a member of the 2012 Distinguished Teaching Award selection committee. Prior to business school, he served as a research analyst at Taconic Capital Advisors, a multi-strategy hedge fund based in New York City, where he worked across the firm’s merger arbitrage, credit, and special situations strategies. Before Taconic he was an analyst in restructuring and reorganization at The Blackstone Group. He earned a Bachelor of Science in economics, summa cum laude, from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and was a Joseph Wharton Scholar. He is coauthor of a study, “Footnotes Aren’t Enough: The Impact of Pension Accounting on Stock Values,” published in the Journal of Pension Economics and Finance, Nov. 2008. He hails from Los Angeles and is an avid mountaineer, having scaled mounts Kilimanjaro, Kenya, Daniel, and Whitney within a two-year span.
Peter Shalek
While at Stanford GSB Peter has pursued his interest in entrepreneurship, spending the spring and summer quarters working with a classmate on a web startup in Stanford’s new Venture Studio. Before coming to business school he spent two years evaluating healthcare IT and financial services investments at Hellman & Friedman, a San Francisco-based private equity firm. Before that he worked in the Financial Sponsors Group at Morgan Stanley where he advised private equity firms on a variety of transactions. He graduated magna cum laude from Columbia College where he studied mathematics and economics and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. While at Columbia, he launched an on-campus laundry delivery service by buying an existing service and expanding the product offerings; three years later he sold the company for 100 times the purchase price. He is a native of Purchase, New York.
During the past 12 years the Siebel Scholars Program has created a community of 785 scholars that fosters personal leadership, academic achievement, and the collaborative search for solutions to pressing societal problems. As future leaders in the fields of business and computer science, these students will have the opportunity to directly influence the technologies, policies, and economic and societal decisions that shape the future.
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