Pssst! Hey, MBA student – want an
internship at a major international corporation? It’s an “amazing” opportunity,
and a chance to violate all you hold dear.
Cosmetics giant L’Oreal probably
wouldn’t have known they were inviting the fox into the henhouse when they
sent an internship posting to Harvard Business School candidate Jessica Assaf
on Nov. 3. But the truth was soon revealed to company talent director Shadan
Deleveaux, after he emailed Assaf what was probably one of hundreds of notices
to MBA candidates at elite schools, in which he cited his own “amazing
experience” during a L’Oreal internship.
“I guess you didn’t get a chance
to review my resume before sending this email,” Assaf wrote back. “If you had
you would have realized that I am definitely not the right candidate for an
internship at L’Oreal.”
Assaf has crusaded against
hazardous chemicals since she was 15, “committed specifically to spreading awareness
about the unregulated cosmetic industry and the unnecessary chemicals in our
beauty products,” she wrote to Deleveaux.
THE MBA CANDIDATE AND THE ROCK
STAR
Since June, she and Alexis Krauss
– singer for pop-rock duo Sleigh Bells – have run a blog dedicated to
exposing dangerous ingredients in cosmetic products. Assaf, after
receiving the L’Oreal internship letter, took to their BeautyLiesTruth
blog and wrote a post titled, “L’Oreal
Tried to Recruit the Wrong Girl“. The post, containing the letter, her
response, and now a counter-response from Deleveaux, has gone semi-viral, and
prompted coverage on the feminist website Jezebel and on the front page of The
Harbus, the HBS student newspaper.
Of course, if Assaf had applied
for the internship, the company would have had reason to look into her
background and realized she would not be a good fit.
However, Assaf’s tilt against
L’Oreal illustrates the value many elite B-schools place on admitting to their
henhouses the occasional fox. In fact, soon-to-be-published research by Poets&Quants
reveals that top schools are increasingly targeting prospective students from
non-traditional backgrounds, mostly because such candidates broaden debate in
classrooms and throw curve balls into traditional business ideologies and
perspectives.
‘I CAME HERE TO CAUSE A STIR’
And that, in a nutshell, is
Assaf’s goal at HBS.
“I came here to cause a stir,”
says the 24-year-old from Marin County, California, where she was a founding
member, at 15, of sustainability-focused youth group Teens Turning Green. “You
can be like this crazy activist that doesn’t fit into any boxes and still have
something to contribute.
“I came to HBS with the sole
mission to . . . improve public health and spread awareness.”
Assaf describes her GMAT score as
“definitely on the lower end,” but notes that she had a 3.93 GPA at New York
University, where she received a BA in public health, documentary film, and
social activism.
Three months into her first year
as an MBA candidate, Assaf has found strong confirmation that her work to
inform consumers about the health risks of industrial chemicals is the correct
way forward. “It’s not like I’m anti-business. I want to be part of a business
that provides a solution to the L’Oreals of the world,” Assaf says. “I came
here to get that corporate mindset, to kind of tweak it, twist it. What I’ve
learned from every (HBS class) case is that consumers control the market.”
On the day earlier this month on
which Assaf received the invitation from L’Oreal, she had just finished a class
with professor Joshua Margolis – who specializes in leadership and ethics – and
noted down a quote from him: “Change requires creativity and courage.”
That comment helped inspire her
response, when, before her next class that day, she received the missive from
L’Oreal, she says. “I literally gasped,” Assaf says. “I never thought I would
see L’Oreal in my inbox, at least not to recruit me for a job.”
HBS PROF GIVES NEW IDEAS ABOUT
LEADERSHIP
The cases she’s studied in
Margolis’ class have given her new ideas about leadership, she says. “You can
use your story or your strategy to change the way other people think about an
issue,” Assaf says.
The recruitment letter gave Assaf
a launching platform for her story, and she updated it with the response she
received from Deleveaux the next day.
“Please know, our company’s top priority
is the safety of our customers,” wrote Deleveaux, a 2005 Columbia Business
School MBA. “We would never put an ingredient in a product that we wouldn’t put
on our own skin.”
That response provided further
fodder for Assaf, who then posted L’Oreal’s online statements about the safety
of their products, following them with a link to a list of 1,373 chemicals
prohibited in cosmetics by the European Union, and a statement that, “As of
today, 1,362 of them are still legal and widely used in U.S. products.”
Now, Margolis is helping her
“develop a business plan to try and disrupt the beauty industry,”
Assaf says. “It’s just incredible the support here.”
EAT IT, AND SMEAR IT ON YOUR
FACE
Peers within her HBS section have
joined her in working on two business plans, one of them based on using common
foodstuffs such as olive oil and coconut oil to make beauty products.
On carrying her activist bent
into an elite business school, Assaf says, “There are always going to be people
who believe that I went outside the designated boundaries of how I’m supposed
to act as an HBS student.
“Next time they’re in the shower,
maybe they will flip over the shampoo bottle and look at what’s in it.”
Written by Ethan BaronPoets &
QuantsAuthor on November 11, 2014.
