Experience Darden #377: Student Spotlight | Justin Powers

Welcome to the Experience Darden Podcast. I'm your host Brett Twitty and you're listening to a new episode. On this episode, I'm excited to share my recent conversation with Justin Powers. Justin is a second-year student in our full-time MBA class of 2027 and he and our recently connected talk more about his background, what led him to pursue an MBA, what attracted him to Darden, his interest in healthcare, and so much more. I think you're really going to enjoy this conversation. As always, if this conversation is helpful for you, please like this episode and subscribe to the Experience Darden Podcast so you never miss an update. Remember, you can always check the episodes description for links to Darden blogs, social channels, and more. Now with that further ado, here's my conversation with Justin Powers. Justin, welcome to the podcast. Yeah, thank you, Brett. It's a pleasure to be here. Well, it's great to talk with you. How's everything going? How's your summer? It's going very well. I'm doing a lot of very exciting work, working at PBM Capital in Charlizeville, which is a venture capital fund, and I'm also getting a lot of FaceTime with the portfolio companies working across autoimmune oncology, kind of exactly what I came to Darden to pursue. Well, that's wonderful. Let's go back a little bit. Tell us about your story and kind of how that became what you wanted to do when you came to Darden. Tell us about your background. Yeah. So basically, right, or for the past decade, I've worked in clinical research and development. I went to Eastern Michigan University, which is a pretty small school. It's a teaching university in Michigan. And there's where I fell in love with science and research. I started out in chemistry designing drugs. After I graduated, I got to them pivot into an actual research-based institution, the University of Michigan, where I got to spend two years doing very, very incredible work, directly trying to make drugs for cancer. It was at that time that I realized I wanted to do a PhD. And thankfully, I got into Columbia University. And while I was there, I had the opportunity to pivot from chemistry to biology. And what this really allowed me to do is get kind of the full pipeline, how we make the drugs, but then how we test the drugs, and how we even determine what to target with the drugs we make, which is what biology gives you insight into. So as I started to wrap up my PhD, I realized that I really wanted to make sure that drugs are making it to patients. I was always fascinated with clinical research because of the potential to change patients' lives. And there's this thing called the Valley of Death, where basic discovery and useful therapeutics, there's this interface where they often don't do anything. They effectively die. And it's the process of taking an idea from academia, getting funding, building it up, getting it through clinical trials, and commercializing it. And that was something that I wanted to understand. And Darden ended up being the perfect place to do that. And so that's what I'm doing now. Wow. So a lot of school before you, before you came to business school, I mean, what is it about an MBA that really stood out to you is, you know, I need to do this, this degree. Yeah. So a lot of school, I'm a glutton for punishment, absolutely. The reason why the MBA, it was actually kind of a serendipitous. While I was wrapping up my PhD, I had a brilliant undergraduate researcher who came in and assisted me. His mother was actually a Darden alumni, very successful CEO of biotech companies, were multiple commercial pharmaceutical companies. And she began mentoring me when she realized I had this passion to translate science to the clinic. And it was actually through her advice that she said, you can obviously try and jump into business role right now, but you're going to basically be limited to learning whatever you see at that job. And you're not guaranteed to get a full spectrum of experiences. So naturally, she pushed me to do an MBA. So I could get a full survey of all of these problems. It's a lot better to make a mistake in the classroom than it is to make it when you're operating a company. And naturally, she pushed me to Darden because of the case method. Naturally fit my learning style. It's the best way to learn business and apply it and really stress test if you're understanding the concepts or diagnose what's going on and correct it before your role where you could do damage if you make a mistake. Yeah, it gives you that chance to practice. I mean, very supportive environment too. I think sometimes people think about the case method and they think about speaking up in class and can feel a little intimidated by that. Learning to the case method was something that came easily to you and tell us a little bit about your progression in terms of that learning experience. Yes, the case method was a bit natural to me and the sense of a PhD is 95% failure and 5% success. So for five years, I just made mistake after mistake tested ideas. They were wrong. Test ideas, they were wrong. So I am not afraid to speak up and say something that is just blatantly obviously wrong in front of a group of people. It's actually where I thrive. What is difficult about the case method, though, is the way it's sort of a synthesis of all of these brilliant minds in a single room. And it goes beyond that because you have your learning teams, which is groups of six or seven people who are also completely different backgrounds. And it's really understanding how to lean on them. Because as a scientist, I'm completely individual. I was at the bench by myself. I was conducting research by myself. It was my ideas, my hypothesis. I had some support, but ultimately you're sort of alone. And you just can't do that in business. And I really like to describe the learning teams as kind of a joke. It's like not that they're a joke, but like a lawyer, a scientist, a military officer, an accountant, and a school teacher in a ballerina walk into a room. It sounds like you're teaming up something, but that's actually the darn an experience. I can't spell geopolitics, but someone from a military background understands it very fluently. And so things that I may not even recognize are a problem in a case. They'll identify it. And so it's really learning how to utilize the people around you to their full potential. That was the biggest learning curve for me. Yeah. I think when people ask us what we're looking for in terms of perspective students, we're always stressing that we're looking for people who are collaborative, who are interested. Not only in learning with other people, but also from other people, which is a big part of the darn experience, right? Being open to other people's perspectives, experiences, and knowledge. It's prerequisite. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think I think that's a great building block for all aspects of your career and not just learning in the MBA. I mean, I very much am a believer in mentorship. I believe that you don't need to come up with the path all on your own. There's usually people out there who've already walked that path. And so being able to just see, not just collaborate with the people sort of in your year, but collaborate with people who want to be potential mentors and being a protégé to those people. So they can help you get to where you might be in a position to support them, or even if it's just for the ability to say that they helped dart and grow in the community by supporting someone. I think those are very important opportunities to take advantage of. So you come to Charlotte's Hill, your brand new MBA student. Obviously, you've been to a fair amount of school, but what was the process like of adjusting to be in a business school environment? The process to adjusting to being in a business school environment was from a social aspect. It was really learning not to put my foot in my mouth. I believe that there is a way to communicate that I wasn't very familiar of being a scientist. It was very brash. When something's wrong, you point it out. You save your friend who's in the hood next to you, maybe a week of doing experiments. So just saying you're blatantly wrong is fine. But again, there's so much perspective and uncertainty that come into the cases that you're solving when you are in business, that you can assume that you're always right. And there were cases where it was pharma cases. We did many pharma cases. And I felt like I was the sort of leading expert on the science of course, but it didn't necessarily mean that I had the secret to solving that case. And sometimes it was a logistical issue that went far beyond the basic science. And so being able to recognize that and learn when to shut up and when to talk in the classroom and when it was appropriate, not just for the sake of not being too brash in the context of the room and people see me that way, but in the sense of we want to solve the case together as the section and get to the end in a meaningful way, you have to know how to communicate properly. One of the underrated skills in the case met that something faculty will actually stress, oftentimes when they're talking about learning through the case met, the people always think about the talking part of it. And yes, ability to communicate and express your ideas and listen to other people and synthesize those perspectives and maybe pivot from your original position, all important. But a critical skill is listening and hearing what other people are saying. And I think people tend to overlook that when they're thinking about the case met that they're just thinking, "Oh, I've got a talk, I've got to speak up, I've got to add to the conversation, not participation is going to be 40% of my grade in this class, I've got to add something." But listening is equally important. Yep, and it's one of those constant feedback cycles, right? And it's what I love being a scientist. I don't think there's such a thing as perfection. I think you can just work closer and closer to it. So I might be in a room where we're doing a fashion case. And someone who had experience directly working in a fashion retailer says, well, from my experience, here is my input. Well, we're not going to just assume that they're completely correct either. We're going to take their idea, pass it around the class, and then wait for the next version of it. So it's almost like you're modifying two variables at once, and you're just trying to get close to the right answer. And every time you send it around the room, it gets closer, but then it looks like something different. And then people have different insights on it. And you just keep on doing that until you end up with what you think is as close to perfection, but you kind of have to reconcile yourself that in business, there is no such thing as 100% correct. Yeah, how does that feel coming from more of a scientific-- things are maybe a little bit more black and white in that world than in the business world, although I don't know. Maybe there's always room for interpretation. How does that feel? How do these two worlds connect or compare? Yeah, as a scientist, your goal is to eliminate uncertainty. And so it's actually quite similar to some of the cases we double in Dart in, where I'm trying to repeat an experiment over and over again until I'm confident that my result is real. And so we have these arbitrary cutoffs of what's statistically significant is. It's like a p-value of 0.05. We actually cover this. And some Dart in class is actually decision analysis. But for example, if you're given a marketing case, you're given so many exhibits, so many directions you can take it, there's uncertainty all over the place. There's incomplete information, noisy data, contradictory data points. And so really what your job is to form your hypothesis, identify the variable that will basically destroy your company if you're wrong. And then you have to accept uncertainty everywhere else. And that is just something you can't do as a scientist. You spend five years not doing one experiment. You're doing all of the surrounding experiments to eliminate uncertainty everywhere. Yeah, I appreciate that. I love people's perspectives on learning experience at Darden, because there's a lot of commonality. But everybody kind of brings their own flavor to it, depending upon what their background was. So thank you for sharing that. Justin, it obviously sounds from your story that you're somebody who came to Darden with a real clear sense of what you'd like to do. But can you tell us a little bit more about maybe did that evolve at all during the course of your time in your first year? Obviously you've talked a little bit about what you're doing in the summer here, but how did your career goals evolve? - Yeah, that's a great question. So I'd like to say I stood to the same path. And I think really when I came into Darden, I broke it down into sort of two ways I could look at it. Either I wanna maintain a functional role that I pursue or a role sort of in a sector where the material is in the same place. And what I mean by that is if I want to be a consultant, I don't care what I'm consulting for and love with the methodology underlying consulting. So I'm gonna pursue that. But if I'm very involved in healthcare, then I don't care if I'm doing healthcare, I be healthcare consulting, healthcare marketing. And initially I came in very much guided towards the idea that I wanted to be in healthcare. One of the conversations that drove me to Darden was after having looked at my personality, looked at what I wanted to achieve in academia and saying I wanna achieve that in sort of commercial pharmaceuticals now. It was, I was told I might be very good as a CEO if I prepare myself properly. So I'd like to say that's the end goal. And what I really took time at the beginning of my Darden experience the entire first semester was just taken as many coffee chats as I could with people who were in those executive positions in healthcare. So I spoke to people who got there through consulting. I talked to people who got there through marketing at commercial pharmaceuticals, founders who built it from the ground up. And Venture Capital really appealed to me. The reason it appealed to me is in science, you're basically trying to create something out of nothing. So you're very early stage. That's what your PhD is. And Venture Capital, while I'm not necessarily creating out something out of nothing, I'm looking at hundreds of companies that are doing that. They're trying to invent in the space where there's currently nothing. And I have to look at their science, but also consider the business opportunity and decide do I think this will be something that we have the strategy to progress it from where it is now to getting into the clinics, but also is the science strong enough to pass the clinical trials. Do I think it's going to be safe? Do I think it's going to be effective? And so that's just what I live and breathe for and that's what I'm currently doing. - Well, I love that. And thank you for sharing your process. I think it's really important for people to hear about the work that goes in. 'Cause I think a lot of times people look at an MBA program and they see all the structure around the recruitment process and may not realize all that's happening in the background at the student level. How important networking is and building relationships and how do you get known beyond your resume and how do you investigate what you think you want to do? I always actually use the scientific method as a little bit of an example. You have an hypothesis. You think you want to do this, but you have to test it. Yeah, go into company briefings is going to help you, but it's not going to help you necessarily as much as having informational calls with people about what they do and tell me about your role. What do you like about it? What advice much you have for me? Anybody else you think I should speak with? Those conversations play a huge role in the career process. Yeah, and they're fuel for you. Every time I got off with one of those calls, I was very happy that I was able to identify people who were genuinely passionate about what they did. And so anytime I hang up the call, even now when I speak to founders who are investing their entire academic stake into this one startup, it's literally the penultimate like sort of cherry on top of a very impressive scientific career. They just live and breathe this stuff. And it's the same thing on the business side. There are just investors who love the process of meeting scientific founders, learning about the science and then going and doing the fundraising process and just selling people on this vision. And so getting as much of that as possible, as early as possible in the MBA, it really is going to dictate where your passions are because that's the place you want to work. If you finish your coffee challenge, you're like, that sounds kind of like they have passion, but I'm not passionate about it. Well, it's not even really worth pursuing in my opinion. And I mean, that's a great example of why those conversations have a lot of impact for students. There's an element of discovery just generally about the company and about the role, but also kind of self discovery too, right? Is resonating with me. Does this sound like something I'd want to do? Just, I know something that we've been in touch about is all the interesting biotech activity and healthcare related activities happening in Charlottesville. Is that something that you've been interested in as you've gone through your time here at Darden? - Yeah, among the case method, the budding biotech environment is something I'm very passionate about. Again, my sort of personal philosophy is that I want to bridge academic research to commercial and I want to be the person who can speak both languages and be bilingual. Naturally, I don't think that someone like me should even really have to exist. I would like to see the value of academic research directly translate to clinical research where professors who are doing the research are brought up to, with sort of a mind on how we commercialize and make sure we're building products that don't just get nice papers in nature science, which are obviously very prestigious journals, but also are able to then not be so complicated that you can no longer commercialize them. And to my surprise, one of the things I'm most excited about is actually the CEO of the Fund I'm at, Paul Manning has started the Manning Institute, which is doing just that. It's basically allowing people to bring their research to the institute and build it with commercial intention. And that's exactly what I want because there is a lot of ambiguity that you can kind of get way down in basic science where you really wanna prove that every aspect of it is right and you wanna foolproof it. But as we know in business, you can't get rid of all uncertainty and by the time you do, you probably miss your opportunity. And so being able to accelerate ideas safely and effectively, that's a fantastic opportunity. But on a broader scale, we have the Healthcare Initiative at Darden. We have obviously a beautiful medical research facility. I mean, UVA hospital is world renowned for the incredible research that they're doing. Translational research centers, the C-Vell Biohub, so a direct incubator to build up these startups and really incredible startups, like Avant Springbach that are in these fields of biotech and pharmaceuticals are branching out of here. So there's just incredible amounts of resources for students interested in healthcare and particularly biotech, which is what I love. - Yeah, and thank you for highlighting all of that. And I have to give just a little bit of credit. You reached out just a few weeks ago saying, hey, I think it'd be interesting to have a little bit more focus on what's happening in biotech here in Charlottesville. So I'm hopeful that we can have some conversations coming up that'll highlight some of those things. So if it sounds of interest. you stay tuned and all credit to Justin for the suggestion. We appreciate that. We've had a chance to feature the healthcare initiative here on the podcast and talking with faculty about that and how that translates across the curriculum for students. We also have clubs and organizations. Students can be a part of it. I think one of the things that you hear pretty regularly from Darden students who have these kind of interest and there's opportunities in the Charlottesville area to network with people is it's not very hard to get in touch with people. It's very easy to network. A lot of access. You're in the UVA network. You're in the Darden network typically when you're reaching out to these companies and individuals and they're more than happy to connect with you. Has that been your experience, Justin? Absolutely. It's really sort of stitched into the to the fabric of the UVA personality. I mean all the universities I've been to in the past. It's quite difficult to get alumni to respond back to you and there's a lot of factors that can go into that. Obviously the size of the programs is difficult to respond when you have 50 emails a day asking for coffee chats. But there is something about I don't know what is the secret sauce of UVA and Darden in particular where you do have the alumni that are just very passionate about Darden reaching its full potential and so they do reach out and then that sort of bleeds out to the rest of the community where you can't build a biotech in Charlottesville even if you're not from UVA. You have no affiliation without knowing the Darden students and it's almost infectious to to interact with the ecosystem and then you yourself a passionate and innovative scientist by wanting to connect to these people. You have very passionate students who want to come work for you or just hear about your technology potentially do some projects or even just provide ideas or just give you that little endorphin brush after having a conversation discussed in your technology. It's very easy to talk to anyone about biotech out here and it's something I do regularly. Well it sounds like you're having a great summer doing exactly what you want to do which is always good to hear. What are you looking forward to in your second year? What's exciting to you as you think about the year to come? Yep so with regards to the healthcare initiative I know it's been covered on the show before but we have Tracy Hope coming in who led innovation at UVA hospital. She's taking over healthcare after the great Paul Mathearn is retiring and so we have this it has nothing to do with that shift but it also just happens to align with this year where we have companies like Eli Lilly and AstraZeneca coming to Virginia a lot of money being peddled in to promote biotech from the government as well as all of these and sort of biotech companies coming up investments coming into the area that it just seems like the perfect chance to catch lightning in a bottle and really make Darden known for healthcare. I know we do very well in investment banking we do well in consulting we do well in all areas because I think the case method prepares you for it but it just feels right this year that being a part of the healthcare club being a part of the Darden ecosystem things are going to really take off and I think every year from now on is just going to get better and better. I think we're going to see some exponential growth in what we achieve in healthcare. I love that idea I'm hopeful that we're going to be able to feature a conversation with Tracy and Tracy Hope in the coming weeks so if that sounds of interest to you listeners stay tuned again I have to give Justin some credit for sort of nudging us along here but we have a faculty spotlight series called office hours where we'll feature regular conversations with faculty and like expect that as we look to the fall we might have some that might be a little bit of healthcare oriented so stay tuned. So any classes that you're taking that you're excited about Justin and I know school may feel a little far away but it's coming here for you but any classes that you're looking forward to. Classes I'm looking forward to taking definitely I will mention a class I took in the in the quarter four of the first year we get to take electives. I took a factual entrepreneurship which as someone in venture capital knowing the entire process of how to take a business from a very risky uncertain early stage endeavor and growing it sort of through very well established frameworks and saying a class full of founders even though myself I'm not a founder was was incredibly incredibly enriching so so if I wasn't taking that class in that and it was coming up or if I hadn't taken that class I was going to be taking it soon I'd be very excited about it but of course I'm excited to do the healthcare financing class I spent some time looking at deal structure over the summer for various biotech companies I feel like I'm starting to really cut my teeth in in finance which was very intimidating coming into Darden so being able to participate in the private equity class and synthesize it in the negotiations I'm going to get to see if I can uh uh handle myself against some of my other uh incredibly intelligent uh Darden classmates uh and and see if I can get some decent deals out of it uh is going to be exciting well just enough I'm curious uh you have any advice for our respective student listeners who oftentimes ask this question anything that you would encourage them to think about as they as they consider their own MBA journeys yes uh and and I don't know how many people it will apply to because I think being self-aware is very important in the MBA process or really any process in career selection but um I will say that what I believe I've been able to capture and why I've been able to to translate from various areas of my life into into kind of drastic changes so so full color um I was not an impressive high school student I was terrible at STEM classes and uh when I began university I had no idea I would even become a scientist or take as far as I did it was through the application of of what I was seeing in lectures and kind of breaking that asymmetric uh cycle of static learning where you're just basically learning uh from textbooks and I don't believe any textbook is really completed I believe we're building upon that knowledge and so being in that system and and really on top of that it was the professors uh high school teachers are obviously very useful it's a commendable job there's something about professors at universities these doctors who committed decades of their life to pursue and research and discovering and pushing the boundaries of of what we know in a specific very very specific area that embeds a passion in them and that's what really brought me into science that I hadn't seen in high school it it caught me I'd built my career in it and even it through the MBA pivot I'm still maintaining what I'm passionate about and I think the MBA is hard the job you're gonna do is hard but I I feel like just like someone could go home and play video games for 12 hours because that's what they're passionate about I can go home and just read papers and read about deals and work on due diligence build pitch decks because it's what's fun for me and so I would really say if you come into Darden and you know that you have a passion it should be non-negotiable that you pursue it as much as you can uh and and you should be able to find something if you're willing to reach out and do the hard work of course that's not to say everyone who comes into Darden needs to know exactly what they want to do it's a great place to discover yourself it's a great place to pivot and really embrace that process but but for me I can just attest to to just follow your passions relentlessly on wavering and you're you're gonna be happy with wherever you land I appreciate your sharing that I people ask us a lot of questions about what we're looking for in the admissions process but passion you know something that's really motivating and exciting to you I think that is genuinely authentic in the application process and something that we love to see and love to hear about you know hopefully you're excited about Darden uh you know that's also something we're looking for but at a minimum you know we want to know you know what's motivated you to take this step why you're excited about pursuing an MBA and you know not just these business school related concerns but you know hobbies and interests things that are important to you personally um things that you know have inspired you to take the steps that you've taken that have led you to this point um the difference between sort of a really compelling application more but average application is in the compelling applications those kinds of things really come come through and you feel like you're getting a sense of the person's personality and who they are authentically and you know there are there's no one right person uh for an MBA program and so really lean into who you are and and translate that you know throughout the application and think of it as a storytelling exercise that's the other big takeaway is you know the application is an initial introduction to who you are and so being really thoughtful and intentional about how you're introducing the yourself to the committee and leveraging those elements the application can go a long way and be excited about the stuff in the process that you're at even if you're not certain where you're going to go if you're considering all career routes can convince people you're passionate about that you're going to be wrong you're going to have coffee chats that don't go so well you're going to say crazy things in classroom that maybe film embarrassing at the moment but looking at that at the beginning of the process really excited me um and if I didn't know I was going into uh stem and saying in health care I would have been equally excited about all the different opportunities I mean what a what a incredible opportunity to be at a school for two years and get to absorb knowledge and the world you're oyster you can go anywhere um so getting excited about that and communicating that I think is just so it's important for the admissions process but I think it's just important to get the most out of the experience yeah we we had a conversation sort of a pre matriculation onboarding conversation with the incoming executive MBA class a few years ago in one of our finance faculty wherever was all in the was on the call all and said, you know, people talk about school in this way that like, oh my gosh, I've got to go back to school, I've got to have class, I've got all this work to do. Maybe it's worth thinking about it in another way that, oh my gosh, I get to go to class, I get to learn, I get to be around this incredible group of people like, what a privilege. How amazing that you can do this and certainly as you're going through the process of figuring out where that might be, man, how many great people you get to meet along the way? How much you get to think about yourself and where you want to go and having that space to kind of take stock of all that you've done and accomplished and what you might hope to accomplish in the future, it's rare to have those opportunities. So enjoy it and certainly in two years goes by very quickly in an MBA program. You need to make sure you're taking time to appreciate it along the way. It's recognizing that you're in the good old days while you're still in them. I still look back at my PhD and I say, wow, I got to wear sweatpants to a lab and come in at any time and stay late and go out and get dinner with my friends. At the time, I was like, oh man, I have to do this experiment, but eventually I'd change my mentality. I was like, no, I get to do these experiments. I get to publish in papers. I've got to communicate my research, go to conferences, talk to some of the most brilliant minds in the world. And then you look at the advantages of business school. It's the exact same thing. You get to talk to the best business minds. You get to learn from the most passionate professors and Darden has, though, as I mean, we win it in the Princeton Review almost every year. If you're going to teach the case method, I mean, that's a tall order to wrangle some of these students. So you have to be passionate about it. So Darden has it in spades. Well, Justin, I want to thank you for taking some time out of your summer, your internship to connect today. And thank you so much for listening to the podcast. Always nice to have a listener on the show. And thanks for the suggestions about highlighting all the interesting biotech things happening in Charlottesville. Trust that we will have maybe an episode or two in the future. So stay tuned. And thank you, Grant. And that was my conversation with Justin Powers, a second year student in our full-time MBA class of 2020. As always, if you had any comments, suggestions, requests, anything like this to cover here on the podcast for all years, we can reach the Darden that's D-A-R, D-E-N, and AdVirginia.edu. And until next time, stay safe, be well, and thanks for listening. [MUSIC PLAYING]