2026 Best & Brightest Business Major: Fares Hajji, Indiana University (Kelley)

by: Jeff Schmitt on April 03, 2026 | 14 minute read

Fares Hajji

Indiana University, Kelley School of Business

“Obsessed, kind, endlessly curious figure-it-outer and connector of people and ideas.”

Fun fact about yourself: My twin brother and I were born at seven months, weighing less than two pounds, and both have two official first names because, apparently, he didn’t want to share food in the womb (Twin-to-Twin Transfusion Syndrome).

Hometown: Tunis, Tunisia

High School: Lycée Pierre Mendès France de Tunis

Major: Finance

Minor: Informatics

Favorite Business Course:  F272 – Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Singapore with Professor Gerry Hays. An eight-week class with a two-week trip to Singapore. Life changing.

Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles During College:

  • Extracurricular Activities & Community Involvement:
    • Undergraduate Business Diversity Council – President
    • Financial Services Club – Co-President
    • TEDx Indiana University – Director of Curation
    • ECMG (Student-Led Investment Fund) – Portfolio Manager
    • Hack4Defense – Team Lead
    • Credit Club – Founding Advisor
    • Kelley Student Government – General Delegate
    • Crimson Equity Partners Co-Investment Fund – Member
    • Investment Management Workshop – Member
    • Investment Banking Network – Member
    • IU Model United Nations – Member
    • International Student Ambassador
    • IU Hamilton Lugar School of Global & International Studies – Arabic & French Tutor
    • Habitat for Humanity – Volunteer
    • Competitive Soccer, handball and Innertube Water Polo Intramurals
  • Awards & Honors:
    • National Arabic Debate Championship Winner (2024)
    • 2nd Best Speaker – U.S. Arabic Debate Network (2025)
    • 2nd Best Speaker – U.S. Arabic Debate Network (2024)
    • Kelley Impact Case Competition – Winner
    • MSF Midwest Case Competition – Winner
    • IU Kelley Diversity Case Competition – Winner
    • Most Collaborative Leader (UBDC) – Office of Undergraduate Studies
    • Dean’s List (2022–2026)
    • Kelley Honors Program
    • Hutton Honors College

Where have you interned during your college career?

Freshman Summer: ICBC Standard Bank, London, UK – Debt Capital Markets and Global Markets Intern

Sophomore Summer: Morgan Stanley, New York, NY – Fixed Income Sales & Trading Summer Analyst

Junior Summer: Morgan Stanley, New York, NY – Fixed Income Sales & Trading and Secured Lending Summer Analyst

Where will you be working after graduation? Monroe Capital, Chicago, Private Credit Investment Analyst

Who is your favorite business professor? My favorite business professor is Tony Huang.

Tony is not someone who looks for the spotlight. But what he models — often without even realizing it – has shaped me profoundly. He has an uncommon ability to receive ideas openly and share knowledge generously. Watching how he operates, how he listens, and how he invests in people has been as educational as any syllabus.

One of my favorite quotes from Alan Waxman is, “Face the tiger.” To me, that means leaning into difficulty rather than circling it. Tony embodies that mindset. He is always open to new ideas, always willing to challenge assumptions, and always ready to go the extra step for his students.

Over the past year, Tony and I have been running a small book exchange: Every two weeks we trade books and discuss them. Tony approaches every interaction as a learner. He often repeats, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” In many ways, he appeared meaningfully in my college experience – not just as a professor, but as an example of what lifelong learning truly looks like.

What is the biggest lesson you gained from studying business? ’Figure it out.’ I think that’s the biggest lesson, and a skill that no LLM or agent can substitute. Business is about getting things done, connecting people, and continuously learning in environments where the answers are rarely obvious.

At IU, I credit a significant amount of my learning to a program with professor Tony Huang and the mentorship of Peter Kaufman, CEO of Glenair. Kaufman would recount what his best friend Charlie Munger (Yes, that same Charlie Munger you are thinking of) used to say about the matter: ‘If civilizations can only progress when it invents the method of invention, you can only progress when you learn the method of learning.’

That idea reframed everything for me. What matters really is the way you do things and not necessarily anything specific. The discipline of thinking, the ability to deconstruct a system, the willingness to adapt – these compound far more than any single technical skill (those are important obviously, but at the high level they become commoditized). You also have to believe in the result and go for it. If a door is closed, it doesn’t mean it’s locked – so push. Initiative is underrated. Too many people stop at resistance instead of testing it.

I think that the most successful people are those who have that approach: wherever you put them, they can understand things, figure out the rules of the game, and play. I like to say that I don’t really care what game we are playing, explain the rules to me, give me some time, and let’s go win!

What advice would you give to a student looking to major in a business-related field? Think longer term, keep learning, have fun, and get in love with the process not the podium. The podium is nice – people enjoy it – but that’s not where you learn. You learn in the classroom, gym, and trading room (that’s where I spent at least 50% of my time. My friends know I call it my HQ).

When you play the long game and position yourself to always go for what you don’t know, you become unstoppable. Growth compounds when you consistently choose curiosity over comfort.

The beauty of business is how applicable it is to any field. It trains you to think in systems — incentives, tradeoffs, capital, people – and those tools travel well. That’s why it’s important to think bigger picture and not fear taking a step back to make sure the next move is intentional.

I saw this firsthand. After strong early exposure to trading and public markets, I chose to step into private markets, a space I understood less at the time. That decision led me to get involved with the Private Equity program at IU and join the founding and first investment team of Crimson Equity Partners, the first undergraduate private equity co-investment fund in the country. What began as intellectual curiosity evolved into helping raise and deploy over $5 million in capital and made me decide to start my career in the space. The move wasn’t about optimizing what I already knew. It was about expanding into what I didn’t.

An interesting dynamic students face is this: Do I optimize for what I’m good at now to secure opportunities, or do I work on what I’m interested in but not yet good at, risking fewer short-term wins? I would always choose the latter. The short-term rewards polish. The long-term rewards expansion.

Finally, business is about people. Send that extra message. Send that email. Go for that drink. At the end of the journey, it’s the people you remember – and who remember you.

Looking back over your experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently in business school and why?

I would have joined that competitive inner-tube water polo intramural league earlier.

More broadly, in business school, I would have built my routine and stuck to it much earlier.

Business school rewards ambition. There are classes, recruiting timelines, leadership roles, and competitions. It is easy to run at full speed all the time. In my first year or two, I optimized heavily for output. I was involved in a lot, but I hadn’t yet built the structure to sustain it.

Habit stacking worked well for me once I figured it out: fixing time every day for reading, taking notes, and thinking without distraction. Eventually I designed a structure that gave me clarity and momentum, but that consistency came later than it should have.

My dad used to emphasize discipline and structure constantly. I did not fully understand it until I experienced the alternative. Your routines shape your state of mind more than you realize. When your structure is unstable, your thinking is scattered. When it is intentional, everything compounds. I ultimately learned that performance in business school is less about intensity and more about rhythm.

But Innertube water polo is very fun, highly recommend it.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What is one insight you gained from using AI? AI is clearly very important at Kelley. It continues to be actively used and experimented with every day as the faculty, students, and the whole world continue to comprehend the capabilities of these tools and how they will reshape our lives and education.

One initiative I closely witnessed was the Kelley Prompt-a-thon. Last year, Kelley launched a competition built entirely around generative AI. Teams were given one hour to solve a defined business challenge. In our case, it was building a business plan tailored to a specific founder profile, with one key constraint: we could only use outputs generated by large language models. Every slide, every analysis, every assumption had to originate from tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Claude. No traditional research, no independent drafting; just prompts and iteration. This fundamentally changed how I think about AI.

Kelley complements that hands-on experimentation with exposure to the frontier. Earlier this year, I traveled to San Francisco with the IU Kelley Investment Banking Network and visited firms such as Altimeter Capital, TPG, and General Catalyst, where we heard from investors building the AI Tools and technology that is changing our world. Those conversations reinforced the same insight: AI is not just a productivity tool. Instead, it is reshaping capital allocation, business models, and competitive advantage at scale.

My biggest takeaway was that my generation might not be AI Native, but we should absolutely should embrace the new tools and become Bionic with AI.

Which academic, extracurricular or personal achievement are you most proud of? I think what I am most proud of is the community I built, the relationships and special moments I experienced, and the impact I tried to have at the school.

As an international student from Tunisia, North Africa, I came to the U.S. and Bloomington without clear expectations. I was ready to embrace the journey. One thing that has been especially important to me – and makes me proud – is how I balanced integrating into the culture while bringing pieces of my identity with me and learning from the different cultures and people around me.

A key highlight that illustrates this is my involvement with the language programs at IU. I started as a volunteer with the French department and later became a tutor with the Arabic Flagship Program, where I taught more than 30 students and watched many progress toward fluency over my four years here. Through this experience, I met some of the people I care most about. Teaching and sharing gave me as much as it gave them and pushed me to grow.

That involvement naturally led me to IU’s debate team, where I represented IU in the National Arabic Debate Championship, a competition bringing together more than 50 schools nationwide. I participated three times and helped take IU from an unranked team in 2022 to National Champions in 2024, earning us the opportunity to represent the United States at the global championship in Doha, Qatar.

As IU Football Coach Cig says, The Hoosiers win. In football and on other big stages. Google us!

Which classmate do you most admire? One of the peers I have always appreciated and admire a lot is Andrew Marasco.

Andrew is very smart and hard-working. I really like the way he thinks and how he balances fun with serious ideas. As an aspiring investor, I admire his commitment to investing. Since his senior year of high school, Andrew has been running his own small-cap focused Hedge fund (Matrice Capital) after raising capital. He has built a strong track record, and I genuinely enjoy sitting with him dissecting business models and ideas or having a drink and playing poker.

He has a vision and believes in it despite what people around might think is the right path or way of doing things and I admire that. I believe that he is also a true connector of people and look forward to seeing his continued growth and success in the future.

Who would you most want to thank for your success? My twin brother, Aziz.

My relationship with Aziz is very special. The decision to come to the U.S. and attend different universities was a hard one, but we navigated it very well (he studied business as well). I thank him for always being there for me. I probably call him eight times a day. We are close and I like to say that I’ve never been by myself because since Day 1 (the womb) I had a teammate.

What makes Aziz special is that he is one of those brothers who always set the bar high. The best way to describe him is probably through a story. Freshman year, I captained a team at a case competition at IU. I won and then went on to represent IU at the National Diversity Case Competition against 50+ schools that IU hosts every year. Last year, Aziz registered his own team from Emory University for that same competition and came to IU — without telling me. He faced my university’s team in the group stage, qualified first in the group, and then went on to win the entire competition and take the $10,000 prize money…before sending a celebratory selfie to the family group chat.

He also graduated in three years and is now working in finance as well …

We’ve always had that emulation. He pushes me forward, and I push him forward. I am grateful to him for everything. You quickly realize who you’re truly grateful for when things get tough — your instinct is to reach for those people.

However, he didn’t feature in Poets & Quants. I’ll leave a good word for you, Aziz. Don’t worry –  maybe the MBA edition.

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

  • Lead and defend my first investment before Investment Committee – and see it through to a meaningful outcome.
  • Come back to Bloomington to mentor young Hoosiers and remind them to face the tiger and figure it out.

What made Fares such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“Among the nearly 300 exceptional seniors in the Kelley School Business Honors Program, Fares Hajji distinguishes himself as a true leader and learner. Since our first meeting during a sophomore year Habitat for Humanity shift, I have been struck by his rare combination of genuine warmth and professional drive. As one of only two Tunisian students on campus, Fares has turned a potentially isolating experience into a catalyst for connection.  His campus footprint is both broad and deep.

While Fares is deeply immersed in high-level professional circles—including the Investment Banking Network and multiple investment fund clubs—he is far from one-dimensional. He maintains a profound global perspective and a commitment to civic duty, evidenced by his leadership in Student Government and Model UN. Within our Honors Program, he is a dedicated mentor who consistently volunteers to support his peers.

Academically, Fares’s intellectual curiosity is remarkable. He frequently explores coursework outside his primary discipline simply for the sake of learning, and this year, he successfully navigated a rigorous graduate curriculum. Upon graduation, he will concurrently earn both his Bachelor’s degree and a Master of Science in Finance. Fares perfectly embodies the core values of the Kelley School, making him an exemplary candidate for the Best and Brightest recognition.”

Alison Kvetko, Ph.D.
Director, Business Honors Program
Indiana University Kelley School of Business

DON’T MISS: 100 BEST & BRIGHTEST UNDERGRADUATE BUSINESS MAJORS OF 2026

 

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.