How real-world MBA projects changed how I think about business

When Inaya Mander began her MBA, like most students, she expected to strengthen her business expertise—particularly marketing—and work towards the next stage of her career.

However, what surprised her was how the program pushed her into unfamiliar territory, exploring new industries and high-pressure business situations.

At the time she enrolled as a full-time MBA student, Inaya decided to continue working in her full-time role for Major League Baseball, as a project manager in digital and social design. That demanding balance shaped her experience from the beginning. 

Reflecting on her MBA journey, Inaya feels the practical focus of her degree has been instrumental in shaping her professional life since graduation. We spoke with her to find out why.  

Learning from diverse perspectives

Inaya studied her MBA at the University of Pittsburgh’s Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, based in Pennsylvania. She says one of the defining features of the program was the diversity of perspectives she had around her.

At Pitt, she found herself learning alongside classmates from outside the US who had a wide range of professional backgrounds. That mattered, she explains, both personally and professionally. 

“I’m really big on different perspectives,” she says, “I don’t like being one minded in any regard.”

That desire to look beyond a single point of view shaped how Inaya approached group projects, interpreted case studies, and started to think about business problems. 

Understanding the impact of business 

One module that particularly sharpened Inaya’s view of business was focused on ethics. Rather than treating the subject as a side issue, Pitt’s course prompted her to think more critically about the systems businesses operate within, as well as the trade-offs leaders often must make.

“That class really helped change my perspective,” she says. “It made me a bit more critical about capitalism here in America.”

It also reinforced an observation she increasingly noticed across the program: “Business and politics, especially in the US, go hand in hand. You really don’t do one without the other.”

Studying business abroad 

This intersection of business and politics became especially apparent during a study abroad experience that Inaya spent in Scotland, as part of the Pitt Business Global Research Practicum. This project is designed to help students understand how business interacts with current issues around the globe. 

For Inaya, the experience became much more than just an academic exercise. Her research project compared the workings of the UK Parliament with the US government. While in Scotland, she interviewed officials and spoke to local people to understand the strengths and weaknesses of both systems. 

It also strengthened the way she looked at power, institutions, and competing interests. As an avid consumer of international news, Inaya says that habit fed naturally into the project.

“I don’t just watch US-based news,” she says. “I’ll have four screens up and I’ll have BBC, CNN—a whole bunch—because I’m really big on different perspectives.” 

Applying theory for real companies

Consulting and project-based work has helped Inaya turn classroom concepts into practical business tools. 

Participating in the Berg Fellowship, a consulting-style project run by Pitt’s David Berg Center for Ethics and Leadership, Inaya worked with RoboTac, a Pittsburgh-based wearable robotics company, to help identify new industries where the firm could apply its technology. The project required her to combine and apply a variety of her learnings from the MBA curriculum. 

“We had to do the financials for them,” she says, “Being able to identify who the target audience was and then [establish] how we should target them with the [company’s] technology, those are skills that I directly took from the coursework that I had done previously.” 

Pitching, pressure, and confidence

Through Pitt’s partnership with the National Black MBA Association, Inaya took part in two pitch competitions working on business solutions for automotive company Stellantis. Given only a prompt and limited information to work with, teams were asked to conduct research, build a proposal, and present a persuasive response. 

“I’ve just gotten really good at developing presentations to pitch in front of small and large audiences because of the pitch competitions that I did while I was at Pitt Business,” Inaya says. 

She adds the experience has helped with interviews and other pressured scenarios, and given an insight into something many leaders have grappled with.

“Sometimes you get into certain spaces and you might have a little bit of imposter syndrome,” she says, “I’ve started to notice the more I talk to people that are further in their careers, the imposter syndrome never just goes away. You get better at faking it.” 

Rethinking the future

Alongside this variety of coursework and projects, Inaya also took a 15-week course in generative AI, where she learned to build AI agents. This led her to think more seriously about the ethics of emerging technologies. 

“I realized that it’s growing faster than we are actually keeping up with it,” she says. “There is a lot of bias in AI and you learn that as you build the agents and the models.”

That experience opened her up to a possible post-MBA future beyond the one she had originally imagined. 

“I know I want to get a PhD in something,” she says, “but there is this part of me that would take the route of something like AI ethics.” 

While at Pitt Business, Inaya also launched a marketing consulting firm with another student. She says running the company has become one of the most practical tests of the knowledge and skills she learned during the MBA. 

“Of all the things that I’ve done, running my own business has me applying almost every single thing that I’ve ever learned throughout this program,” she says. 

Ultimately, Inaya says, the clearest lesson she’s learned from the experience is resilience. 

“The fact that I was able to do it made me realize that I can actually do hard things very well.” But, she adds, “You absolutely can’t do anything alone. Group projects will show you that.”