Hangin' Out With...Andrew O'Connor
HBS '21
What Harvard undergraduate, graduate, or executive education program did you complete or are enrolled in?
I graduated with an MS in Engineering Sciences from Harvard SEAS and an MBA from Harvard Business School as part of the MS/MBA program. I was part of the second-ever cohort to go through the program.
What year did you graduate / expected graduation?
I graduated in May, 2021.
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What is your most memorable Harvard experience to date?
Getting to meet my cohort that I went through the program with was amazing – we were 32 people strong. My wife Blakely (PhD, SEAS, ’20) and I hosted everyone at our apartment before the semester started in late summer 2019. We got to meet folks from the new group going through this new-ish program together, and the experience was so memorable. All the people were amazingly, and it was a great way to get a head start in getting to know each other well over the next year and beyond of classes, case work, and problem sets. I will always have a strong connection with my fellow MS/MBA cohort-mates.
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What’s your Bama story—how’d you get here, what made you come back home or how’d you make the jump from Bama to Harvard?
Blakely and I had moved to Boston for her to pursue her PhD right after graduating from Auburn in 2014. I worked for a couple of startups in the life sciences, then moved into venture capital investing over the course of 5 years. At that time, I had decided to pursue getting an MBA, but with the caveat that the program had to be local to Boston so we could stay there together with our family intact (we had 2 kids by that time) while I completed a 2-year program. I only applied to MIT Sloan and Harvard Business School, and only got accepted to HBS, so the choice was easy! During my program, both Blakely and I concluded that we wanted to be close to family (we had no family within 1,000 miles of us in Boston) and be back in the South making an impact in a region that we believe in. The choice became clear for us shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic hit – school would be virtual for me until I graduated, and Blakely graduated just two months after the pandemic swept through the US in May 2020. So that summer, we decided to move to Birmingham, and we haven’t looked back! We’ve truly enjoyed being back in Alabama, being close to family again (almost the entirety of both our immediate families are in Birmingham or nearby) and working for companies here in Birmingham that are making an impact and addressing important problems. The kids love it too!