Sarah Ackels

Georgetown University, McDonough School of Business

“Sarah is an optimistic classmate, tutor, and friend who loves efficiency and helping others succeed.”

Fun fact about yourself: I do hot yoga every Friday.

Hometown: Simsbury, Connecticut

High School: Simsbury High School

Major: Finance; Operations and Analytics

Minor: None

Favorite Business Course: Environmentally Sustainable Operations and Business Models

Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles During College:

• Director and tutor in the McDonough School of Business Writing and Communication Center.
• I co-founded and served as treasurer for Survivor: Georgetown, a club based on the CBS Show Survivor.
• Project Manager and Director of Client Recruitment for Hoyalytics, a data consulting club.
• Manager of student mentors for the first-years’ Social Impact Consulting Project
• Admissions reader for McDonough Class of 2028

Where have you interned during your college career?

• Hartford Steam Boiler Reinsurance as a Claims Information Management Reporting Analyst in Hartford, CT, in the summer of 2022.
• Deutsche Bank as a Corporate Banking Coverage Analyst in New York, NY, in the summer of 2023.

Where will you be working after graduation? I will be working in the Corporate Bank at Deutsche Bank in New York, NY, after graduation.

What is the biggest lesson you gained from studying business? The biggest lesson I gained from studying business was that it’s not about what you are doing, it’s about who you are doing it with. The majority of my business classes throughout my time at Georgetown McDonough have had group projects. These projects taught me personal accountability, how to confront others, and most importantly, that the people around you can make any work pleasant. No matter how late we stayed up modifying models or perfecting PowerPoints, the people I spent my time with made every moment enjoyable. I will always take this lesson with me and continue to surround myself with and work alongside people who make me happy.

What has surprised you most about majoring in business? What surprised me the most about majoring in business is how often I think about business operations outside of class. Once I learn something in one of my classes, especially my operations and analytics classes, I cannot stop thinking about it when I interact with a business. For example, I think about overall efficiency of processes way more than the average person because of what I learned in my operations management class. I will never be able to look at an assembly line in Chipotle without considering which step is the bottleneck; it is almost a curse. Majoring in business gives you practical knowledge of how the real-world works, which I expected, but I was most surprised by the way it infiltrated my thoughts about all businesses.

Looking back over your experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently in business school and why? I spent my entire first year at Georgetown from the (dis)comfort of my home in Connecticut. While I got really good at navigating Zoom, I yearned to be on campus, in person, having a true college experience. Thus, when it came time to decide whether or not I wanted to study abroad, I decided against it, as I felt I had only just arrived at Georgetown. Looking back, I wish I had studied abroad, as business is extremely global. I would have greatly benefited from gaining the cultural education and perspectives from going abroad.

Which academic, extracurricular or personal achievement are you most proud of? I am most proud of my role in starting the Survivor: Georgetown club on campus. After my friends and I felt discouraged by some of the competitive academic clubs on campus, we decided to start a club that was all about inclusivity and fun. We brought our shared interest in the CBS show Survivor to life by founding the Survivor: Georgetown club. Georgetown students are now on their 4th season of participating in Survivor play, gathering for watch parties, and connecting with other campuses’ Survivor clubs. It is so rewarding to have a vision for something and see it come to life, and I am so proud of the inclusive community that we built.

Which classmate do you most admire? The classmate I most admire is Evan Peters. Evan and I have been friends since Professor O’Leary’s First Year Seminar class, where our group won the class case competition. After that, Evan and I remained virtual friends through our spring semester of Zoom, and finally met in person during Georgetown’s summer program. Evan and I have taken most of our business classes together, as we are both Finance and Operations and Analytics majors. We work together extraordinarily well, and I have never met someone with so much brilliance, motivation, and charm. Evan is my number one pick for any group project, and he is the perfect study partner. He is always up to date on new technologies and devotes a lot of his time to working in the tech center. Evan is always willing to help others, and anybody would be lucky to know him.

Who would you most want to thank for your success? My mother, Debra Ackels, is the person who I would thank most for my success. I know that my empathy, intelligence, and beauty come from her. My mom has put me and my siblings first for my entire life, and I would not be the person I am today without her. All of my morals and motivations are informed by my mother’s delicate hand holding through my life, and I could not be more thankful for her consistent love and support.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?

I want to come back to speak to undergraduates at Georgetown. I have learned so much from guest speakers, and I aspire to give back to the business school.

I want to go into business with my friends. I have met some of the most intelligent and innovative people here, and I can’t wait to reconvene with them in the future.

What made Sarah such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2024?

“I got to know Sarah Ackels when she was a student in my First Year Seminar (FYS) course in Fall 2020. Perhaps it goes without saying, but that was an incredibly difficult time. Sarah and her peers had their final months of high school and graduations turned upside down and faced massive uncertainty about how their first year of college would go. For incoming Georgetown students in the Class of 2024, that meant they would not live on campus and they would have their courses fully online via Zoom.

Despite these monumental changes to the conclusion of one phase and the beginning of another phase in her life, Sarah approached her first year and our First Year Seminar with an incredibly impressive degree of enthusiasm and good cheer. She was also a hugely valuable and valued team member. During that stressful time, she worked on a challenging consulting project for a local nonprofit with a team of classmates. Team projects always carry the risk of free-riders and other problems, but Sarah’s teammates wrote glowingly about how important she was during that time. For example, one said, “This was the most rewarding group project I have ever been a part of (in both my high school and Georgetown experiences). I would be so excited to work with this team again in the future, largely because of how Sarah brought us all together!” Sarah has that effect on folks – she rolls up her sleeves and does incredible work, but she also brings everyone together in such a wonderful way. Perhaps not surprisingly, her team won the “People’s Choice Award” from their classmates.

I continued to work closely with Sarah as she became a leader in our McDonough Writing & Communications Center. She worked as a peer coach for my FYS students the next year, trained to be a great coach (in addition to being a great writer), and has led the expansion of the center over the last three years. She also coordinated all of the student coaches for our FYS Social Impact Consulting Projects. This commitment to combining her own learning and growth with helping/coaching her peers is classic Sarah – going all the way back to COVID-driven Zoom classes in Fall 2020!”

Michael Boyer O’Leary
Teaching Professor of Management
Senior Associate Dean, Graduate and Executive Degree Programs

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