Noah George
University of Southern California, Marshall School of Business
“Fueled by curiosity, a relentless tinkerer who loves building deep relationships and binging new sitcoms.”
Fun fact about yourself: I have a 7-year-old sourdough starter named Stuart that I have had to revive 4 different times, but somehow, he still produces the best baguettes!
Hometown: Pasadena, California
High School: La Cañada High School
Major: Business Administration
Minor: Product Design
Favorite Business Course: Deep Learning for AI and Business Applications
Extracurricular Activities, Community Work and Leadership Roles During College:
Leadership & Extra Curricular Activities
- Business Technology Group at USC: Co-President, Vice President of External Relations and Project Manager
- Marshall Case Team: President, Vice President of Professional Development and Strategy Analyst
- USC Marshall Career Center: Peer Career Advisor
- The Consulting Club at USC: Vice President of Corporate Relations
Awards
- Champions Trophy Case Competition – 2nd Place
- Central European Case Competition – 1st Place & Best Speaker
- KPMG Ideation Challenge – National Champion
- Belgrade Business International Case Competition – 2nd Place
- Rotterdam School of Management Case Competition – 3rd Place
Honors
James S. and Dorothy McCune Krueger Endowed Scholarship
Pat and Shirley Ryan, Scholarship in honor of Peter Arkley
Daniel and Margaret Smith Family Endowed Scholarship Fund
Where have you interned during your college career?
Adobe Inc. – Digital Strategy Analyst Intern (New York, NY)
McKinsey & Company – Sophomore Summer Business Analyst (Los Angeles, CA)
Deloitte – Risk & Financial Advisory Discovery Intern
Where will you be working after graduation? McKinsey & Company – Business Analyst (New York, NY)
Who is your favorite business professor? Shannon Faris is truly one of the best professors at Marshall. She teaches Organizational Behavior, which is the very first business course for many students, including myself. I count myself lucky to have ended up in her 8 a.m. class; I honestly can’t imagine my college experience without meeting her. She truly embodies what it means to care for students both inside and outside the classroom. Not only does she prepare us for the politics and minutiae of the workplace, but she also helps us navigate the transition into college life. I genuinely admire her dedication to her students and her passion for improving the entire Marshall experience.
What advice would you give to a student looking to major in a business-related field? My advice to future business students is to pursue every passion you hold and learn to act as the bridge between those interests and the business world. Business is inherently versatile and exists across nearly every discipline and industry. Whether your interests lie in technology, beauty, or agriculture, explore them all. Exploring these interests is the only way to distinguish a lifelong career path from a personal hobby. And occasionally, you may even find a perfect career that integrates all of them.
Beyond identifying a future career, engaging with diverse disciplines prepares you for more effective leadership. Valuable lessons are often shared across seemingly unrelated sectors. For instance, understanding how an agricultural firm structures the financing of its machinery can offer fresh perspectives on capital allocation for a semiconductor company building a new foundry. Explore widely, retain the nuances, and strive to be the bridge between different industries.
Looking back over your experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently in business school and why? It wasn’t until my senior year that I fully realized the depth of research conducted at Marshall. If I could go back and change my undergraduate experience, I would have become more involved in organizational research. It offers a unique lens into why businesses succeed or fail over time. Beyond the insights, working side-by-side with professors would have been a great way to build the kind of mentor relationships that have truly defined my time here. On top of all that, academic research offers rigorous investigative processes and unique methodologies that would have helped me refine my own approach to problem-solving. While I discovered this late in my undergraduate career, I am eager to conduct professional research into how the world’s best businesses thrive at McKinsey.
What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What is one insight you gained from using AI? Marshall has gone all in on AI. Through the leadership of Dean Garret, USC Marshall has integrated AI across all aspects of business education. Through the recently announced partnership with ChatGPT Edu, USC is empowering students to use AI to accelerate their studies and amplify their impact. I believe this is a vital step in preparing students for the future of work, as employers increasingly prioritize AI fluency in new hires.
Beyond providing tools Marshall has heavily incorporated AI into its curriculum through specific courses such as Deep Learning for AI and Business Applications. Courses like this teach students the fundamentals of the models powering the future and how to build them. I had the opportunity to build recommender systems, computer vision protocols, and predicative financial engines, something I never expected from a business course. These classes provide a roadmap for business students to stay informed and act as the bridge between technical developers and non-technical stakeholders. Even in our core business classes, AI is encouraged as a tool to multiply our abilities. In communication courses, we leverage it to refine our messaging; in accounting, we use it to help balance financial statements; and in operations, we code scripts to identify optimal supply allocations.
AI has become a key partner for business students at USC Marshall. Ultimately, using these tools has taught me that while AI is an excellent synthesizer, editor, and executor, true inspiration and storytelling still come from people. AI helps leaders multiply their reach and remove repetitive tasks, but it is critical to identify what must remain human. By using AI to handle the heavy lifting, we can use the reclaimed time to more deeply refine and develop our own unique ideas.
Which academic, extracurricular or personal achievement are you most proud of? The Business Technology Group (BTG) at USC was the first organization I joined and was the caring and compassionate community that shaped my entire undergraduate experience. Becoming Co-President and expanding the impact BTG has on its members, its clients, and the community it serves is the achievement I am most proud of.
My board and I committed to a total transformation of the organization, redefining our standards, values, and operating systems. We built an entirely new general membership program to expand accessibility. We launched our first community service branch to teach design thinking to local high schoolers. We developed a new client acquisition strategy that secured partnerships with five of the world’s largest tech companies. And through it all, we remained focused on the mentorship and growth of our individual members.
As satisfying as it is to look back on the club’s transformation and our formal achievements, what stays with me most is the lasting impact I was able to have on the people I worked with. I think about the hundred-plus calls I had with our VPs, directors, and members to discuss their personal goals and professional growth. Seeing the smiles on their faces when they reached those milestones means more to me than any organizational success. I plan to carry the lessons and relationships from BTG with me into the next stage of my career, always striving to leave the same kind of lasting impact on every organization I join.
Which classmate do you most admire? Siddharth Gupta is a genuine inspiration. I met Sid during the spring semester of my freshman year and have worked with him ever since. He has a unique ability to instantly put people at ease and make them feel welcome; even the most reserved people find themselves sharing their stories with him almost immediately.
Beyond his warm personality, Sid is an incredible friend who genuinely cares about everyone around him. No matter how big or small a problem is, he’s there to listen and usually finds a way to make you crack a smile. He truly strives to bring happiness into every room he enters. But what really sets him apart is his spirit; I have yet to find someone better at rallying a room of people than Sid. From him, I’ve learned invaluable lessons about leadership, compassion, and how to find a reason to laugh even in the toughest situations. I am lucky to call Sid a friend.
Who would you most want to thank for your success? My friends, family, and mentors have been instrumental to my success, and I want to specifically thank Sean O’Connell, the Director of International Programs and our faculty advisor for the Marshall Case Team. Sean has been instrumental to both my professional and personal growth throughout my undergraduate experience. Whether navigating the highs of winning or the lows of defeat, he taught me the true meaning of resilience and how to maintain a positive outlook through it all. By showing me the vast scale of global business, Sean expanded my horizons and inspired me to build a life centered on international connection. Seeing Sean lead by investing so deeply in others redefined my own view of leadership and helped me understand that, at its core, leadership is a form of mentorship. But most importantly, he showed me how to keep a sense of humor even in the most high-stakes moments. Sean, your guidance, support, and friendship have meant the world to me. Thank you, thank you! Cheers!
What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?
1) Start my own company focused on space tech
2) Sit on the board of a F500 company
What made Noah such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?
“Noah George is the perfect example of the potential of Marshall students and what they can achieve. Noah will graduate this year with a 3.98 GPA and will start work in New York at McKinsey after holding internships at Adobe (New York), McKinsey (Los Angeles,) and Deloitte (Los Angeles).
He has been an instrumental part of the Marshall Case team, having been a member since his freshman year (he and his team won their first international competition his freshman year, placing first at the Central European Case Competition (CECC), as well as taking the Best Speaker award at the competition as well). that first place finish would be the first of a number of awards including 2nd place finishes at the Belgrade Business International Case Competition (2024), 3rd place finishes at the Australian University Business Case Competition (2024) and the Rotterdam School of Management STAR competition (2025), and most recently a 2nd place finish at the 2026 Champion’s Trophy in Auckland, New Zealand (the de-facto world championships of undergraduate business case competitions). The Champions Trophy competition consisted of 5 5-hour cases. Students were not made aware of the case company or question beforehand, and had 5 hours to analyze, develop, and propose a solution. No books, no internet, no outside assistance at all. Other case competition involved short preparation and analysis times (from 3 to 24 hours)
He served as President of the case team and helped usher in rapid growth and prominence and assisting with the recruiting and training of teams that would qualify for the championships in 3 of the 4 years, he was a member of the case team.
Noah has also served as VP of External Relations as well as President of the Business Technology Group, where he oversaw a growth in membership, as well as the implementation of a CRM tool to better manage membership and external contacts, as well an integrated 10-week training to better prepare members for positions in the tech field.
Offer in hand, Noah still chose to give back to the Marshall community, serving as a Peer Career Advisor, assisting the USC Marshall Career office in advising students of all backgrounds and years on work in consulting.”
Sean O’Connell
Director, Undergraduate International Programs
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