I have been interested in farm animal welfare for as long as I can remember. For years, I pursued this interest through internships and volunteer activism, but never took the step of elevating it to become my academic or professional focus. I hoped to become more involved in the cause one day, but never knew exactly how I would do so.
In 2016, after three years with Deloitte, I was introduced to a longtime animal welfare activist. At the time, I was weighing potential next steps after consulting, and I asked for his career advice. He told me something along the following lines: “Rachel, you would have the most positive impact on farm animals by commercializing a chicken breast that looks and tastes just like traditional chicken meat, but is not made from a living chicken. Make a product that sits in the meat department of a Walmart store, right next to conventional meat and priced competitively.”
My career progression has been a straight line ever since that discussion, culminating in my recent summer internship with Modern Meadow. Originally founded in 2011, Modern Meadow is a venture-backed company working to reimagine animal materials (such as leather) in a lab. Its biofabricated material is intended to not only meet, but exceed, market expectations; aesthetics, performance, and sustainability can comfortably coexist. The internship was a perfect extension of my professional goals, then: I helped to develop a sustainable and ethical material that customers wanted out of desire rather than guilt.
I pursued two primary workstreams during the summer, both focused on strategy and finance. My first workstream assessed a common question for new ventures: as a company, how do we know if we are on track? Modern Meadow is a fairly new entity with minimal historical financials. It operates like both a biotechnology company and design firm, and possesses incredibly strong expertise for a company of its size. I had to pull creatively from my strategy, statistics, and entrepreneurship courses at Tuck to make sense of this question. In the end, I produced a multi-part analysis that helped the company to identify which corporate priorities were most important and in turn, how these priorities can translate into discrete company goals.
My second project was complementary to the first. My two fellow MBA interns and I worked as a team, assessing the competitive market landscape and identifying implications for Modern Meadow. For this workstream, I drew significantly from the “soft skills” I honed during my first year at Tuck. Courses like Leading Individuals and Teams emphasized the importance of adapting leadership approaches to different working styles, and Tuck’s First-Year Project enabled me to practice new methods for managing team projects. By the end, my teammates and I were able to draw from our respective strengths to produce meaningful insights – and had a blast in the process.
The internship was a gamble. I moved from a 290,000-person organization to a startup, from a client-facing role to one fully embedded within a company, from service to product. Riskiest of all, I was testing out whether I could combine my professional skills and personal interests in one role. But the summer was a success through and through, though. I am so excited to return to Modern Meadow next year as a full-time member of the team.
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