By Megha Bhattacharya

Before business school, I had a front row seat to history. I stood in the Rose Garden and watched some of the most consequential legislation of the Biden-Harris Administration get signed into law. I traveled with the President on Air Force One around the world, served as a diplomat at the State Department working on global public diplomacy, and spent years inside institutions whose job it is to make democracy function. I believed in that work. I still do.

Starting at Booth meant stepping back from that world. Or at least, that’s what I originally thought. What I found instead was that the questions I had been living inside didn’t go away. They followed me to Hyde Park and got more complex. How do institutions earn and maintain trust? How does technology deepen civic participation? Who gets access to power, and who designs the systems that determine that? These are not abstract questions at a business school. At Booth, I have been able to iterate on them in ways I hadn’t anticipated.

As co-chair of both Net Impact and the Government and Policy Club, I have spent two years using my commitment to civic engagement as the backbone of my business school experience.

The Net Impact Summit

Organizing Net Impact’s annual summit was one of the most exciting projects I took on at Booth, and it became one of the experiences I am most proud of. We spent a full day working through what social impact looks like in practice: where business incentives and civic values align, where they don’t, and what leaders are supposed to do when the answer isn’t obvious.

The day closed with a keynote and extended conversation with former Mayor Lori Lightfoot, which I had the privilege of moderating. She governed Chicago through an extraordinarily difficult period including a pandemic and a national reckoning on race and policing. As a private citizen, she has continued that work, focused on bringing public and private investment to Chicago’s South and West Sides and holding institutions accountable when they fail. She had just launched an ICE Accountability Project to document federal agent abuses, and when I asked what made her decide that was her project to build, her answer was simple: the moral clarity of the moment demanded it, and someone had to. This genuine conversation highlighted what civic leadership looks like when you no longer hold a title, and how to draw private investment into communities that have long gone without it.

Bringing the Conversation to Campus

The University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics sits a mere two minute walk from Harper Center, and the access it offers students to practitioners of American political life is one of the genuinely distinctive things about this campus. As co-chair of the Government and Policy Club, I worked to make sure that access extended directly into the Booth community.

We hosted Alex Wagner for a conversation about the relationship between government and the private sector, tracing how that relationship has evolved and complicated itself through companies like Uber. We welcomed Admiral John Kirby, former National Security Council Senior Advisor at the White House and one of the defining communicators of the Biden administration, to speak about what a career in public service actually requires over time. These were not just interesting events. They were reminders that the skills being built at Booth, whether in strategy, communication, or leadership, matter enormously in the civic world, and that the traffic between these two worlds should move in both directions.

Going Deeper as an Obama Scholar

This year, as an Obama Foundation Scholar, I had the opportunity to take that work beyond campus and into Chicago itself. Our cohort visited Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Youth Civic Task Force and engaged with civic leaders working on some of the city’s most persistent challenges. We also sat down directly with President Obama to discuss our civic projects with him, a conversation I will not soon forget.

What I carried away from those visits was less about the access and more about the gap it illuminated. The distance between the ambition of civic institutions and their ability to reach and retain young people remains significant. Sitting in those rooms made that feel urgent in a way that no classroom can fully replicate, and it sharpened my sense of what I want to contribute.

GovTech

One of the things Booth clarified for me is how I think about the relationship between government and technology. Through the PE/VC Lab, I self-sourced a GovTech firm and spent a quarter inside the venture ecosystem, understanding how capital flows toward public sector problems. It raised questions I hadn’t thought to ask before: not just what government needs, but who is building it, and whether the incentive structures of venture investment can actually align with the pace and priorities of public institutions.

This past summer, I joined Chief AI in San Francisco as the Chief of Staff Intern, working on product development for tools designed to support government and public sector professionals. I also helped organize an event during SF Tech Week focused on the GovTech ecosystem, bringing together practitioners, investors, and operators to think seriously about that alignment problem. There was something clarifying about building in that space. I knew exactly what the end user needed, because not long ago, I was one.

What Chicago Booth Made Possible

I came to Booth with a clear sense of what I cared about and very little sense of how it all fit together. Two years later, I understand that government, technology, and social impact are not parallel tracks. They are the same project, pursued through different institutions, with different tools, and often by people who have never been in the same room together. Booth gave me the time, the relationships, and the intellectual space to see how those threads weave together… and how to start pulling on them myself.

My path here was unconventional. The White House was not an obvious road to Harper Center. But I have come to believe, with more conviction than when I arrived, that the people this moment most need are the ones who can move between worlds. Who understand how government actually works and can carry that knowledge into the rooms where technology is being built and capital is being deployed. Who refuse to treat public service as a prior chapter rather than a living commitment.

I am not done figuring out what that looks like for me. But for the first time, I can see the shape of it. And that, more than anything, is what Booth gave me.