When the perfect opportunity comes along, it’s hard to say no.
That’s how Maggie Rodney wound up accepting a full-time job in January, five months before completing her Leeds MBA. That’s a heavy load, but Rodney isn’t intimidated by a full calendar—as a full-time student, she was chief of staff at WorkIt, a venture associate at the Techstars accelerator and managing director of the Deming Center Venture Fund.
“What my scholarship gave me, more than anything, was time,” Rodney said. “Which is funny to hear myself say, since I have no time.”
Her scholarships, she said, “gave me the freedom to find the positions and roles I wanted to lean into. Without doing any of that, I wouldn’t have gotten my full-time position, which has been a perfect fit for what I wanted to do.”
Rodney is now a senior associate at Boulder-based Massive, a venture capital firm that specializes in technology, especially B2B SaaS, financial, climate and frontier technologies. The company is currently closing its first deal of the year, and Rodney got to be a contributor to the investment memo that went to Massive’s investors and members, “so I got to see that whole process and feel like my work was getting noticed almost right away.”
Her work co-leading the Deming Center Venture Fund helped pave the way for her career aspirations. The fund is fully student run, which gives its leadership
a lot of freedom in exploring and understanding opportunities in this space, as well as extensive professional development and networking.
“You really get to lean into whatever portion of the entrepreneurial process is most interesting to you,” she said. “For me, that’s finance, but you also get to meet people interested in the legal side, or other areas outside the business school.”