Every February, hundreds of alumni, current student job seekers, and startup founders come together for Sloanies Helping Sloanies, a popular event for impactful career networking. Mentoring, internships, and even job offers emerge organically—and the community’s connections extend year-round through workshops, speaking events, seminars, and other activities for students that feature alumni and other MIT Sloan community members.
“The ethos of MIT Sloan is to create innovative leaders that change the field of management. Through Sloanies Helping Sloanies, alumni are embracing the mindset of offering a ladder to others and giving them a lift as they climb. Folks are looking for ways to assist others in a selfless way,” says Steve Branch, a senior associate director in the MIT Sloan Career Development Office (CDO), which facilitates the program.
For example, Stwart Peña Feliz, MBA ’23, recently hired an MIT MBA candidate to be a summer associate at MacroCycle Technologies, the startup he co-founded when he was a student at MIT Sloan. The connection came through Peña Feliz’s involvement with the MIT Sloan Sustainability Initiative Internship Program.
“I am helping Sloanies because previous Sloanies helped me, and I’m simply paying the favor forward to the next generation,” Peña Feliz explains. Case in point: When a current MBA candidate’s summer internship offer was recently rescinded for economic reasons, Peña Feliz stepped in with an offer immediately. So did three other MIT Sloan alumni.
“I told him I wasn’t extending this offer out of pity but because he’s a great talent. It feels good that a few years after I had an equivalent experience, I’m able to help someone else in the same way that I was helped by a Sloanie.”
I am helping Sloanies because previous Sloanies helped me, and I’m simply paying the favor forward to the next generation.
Making connections
Peña Feliz came to MIT Sloan with “the sole purpose” of founding a company. To learn about the finance side of entrepreneurship, he planned to spend his first summer working in venture capital (VC) after accepting an offer at a Houston-based fund. Unfortunately, his prospective employer informed him just three weeks before the start date that the offer was rescinded because of the macroeconomic environment.
He winces. “It was almost finals, and I was jobless. I only told a few people because, frankly, I was ashamed. And those few people went out of their way to help me.”
From these conversations, another Sloanie connected Peña Feliz to an MIT Sloan lecturer who had just left the Institute to become CEO of a company acquired by a private equity firm. Things worked out even better than they probably would have with the original internship.
“I was hired as chief-of-staff and learned to lead companies, which is a skill set I’m using every day now at MacroCycle,” Peña Feliz says.
The following year, he enrolled in the legendary startup incubator course, Climate and Energy Ventures, where he met his co-founder, Jan-Georg Rosenboom, a polymer scientist at the MIT Langer Lab. They secured an initial $500,000 through Breakthrough Energy Fellows. Still, beyond that, Peña Feliz says he owes the company’s incubation to the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and generous individual Sloanies who offered time, funding, and advice.
Having been an intern once himself, Peña Feliz thought hard about making MacroCycle’s first MIT Sloan summer associate’s experience meaningful enough to give them a leg up in the current rollercoaster job market.
People took a shot on me, and it was only because of them that I was able to go on and get job offers after graduation. That’s why I spend the extra time talking to students about internships or potential companies they’re building coming out of MIT to invest in.
Learning the true meaning of networking
Sloanies Helping Sloanies promotes networking, but that’s an open-ended term with many meanings. Ashley Ryder, MBA ’21, came to MIT Sloan with the idea that networking meant reaching out to an alum and saying: “Hey, I need a job.”
Now a partner at VamosVentures, a Los Angeles-based VC fund, Ryder can laugh at her initial interpretation. “What I learned at MIT Sloan is that it’s important to develop deep and meaningful relationships organically. Networking is about being vulnerable and finding affinity and commonalities,” she says.
At MIT Sloan, Ryder became passionate about breaking into VC as an MBA but compares looking for a job in the sector to pitching her resume into a black hole. Thousands of people apply for any VC job posted, but the best positions are only typically shared by word-of-mouth.
“I had all the puzzle pieces to put together a VC career,” Ryder says. “But what I didn’t have was the deep network related to venture capital [required] to break in.”
She needed to find industry champions willing to pick up the phone on her behalf. Ryder reached out through the MIT Sloan network and offered to work for free for several months to demonstrate her value to several funds.
“I was in school still and also had three venture capital jobs,” she says. While she lost out on sleep, she gained the chance to shadow experienced investors and developed the ability to recognize patterns that would predict which founders would succeed in the space.
“The investors and founders I worked with became my champions when it came time for full-time venture recruiting.”
The ethos of MIT Sloan is to create innovative leaders that change the field of management. Through Sloanies Helping Sloanies, alumni are embracing the mindset of offering a ladder to others and giving them a lift as they climb. Folks are looking for ways to assist others in a selfless way.
Making venture capital hiring more inclusive
Ryder is the first to agree that the system perpetuates privilege—not everyone, herself included, can afford to work for free to prove themselves.
Now, through Sloanies Helping Sloanies, she is pushing to diversify the system and to stop the gatekeeping when it comes to job postings. Beyond her regular work at VamosVentures, she’s also responsible for the MBA Associate Program, which recruits students and young alumni for paid internships throughout the year, training those who don’t yet have deep VC experience but are hungry to learn.
“People took a shot on me, and it was only because of them that I was able to go on and get job offers after graduation. That’s why I spend the extra time talking to students about internships or potential companies they’re building coming out of MIT to invest in,” she says.
Fundamental Research Labs (formerly known as Altera), an MIT startup bent on building digital humans powered by AI, became part of the VamosVentures portfolio because one of its founders reached out through a Sloanies Helping Sloanies connection.
Branch invited Ryder to come back to campus to give a presentation about VamosVentures at a Writing the Code event in 2023. Branch explained, “Supporting the Sloanies Helping Sloanies ethos, the Writing the Code event series was created to connect and catalyze our dynamic talent community of students and alumni by revealing new pathways and networks of opportunity. These events are focused on building networks for the just-in-time job search and sharing market insights and career resources from our extended community of students, alumni, and corporate partners.”
Afterward, Nathaniel Ezolino, MBA ’25, approached Ryder to introduce himself and subsequently applied as a summer associate. Vamos received hundreds of applications for the role, but Ezolino’s stood out. “After he applied, we built a relationship,” Ryder says. “He would send us deals and showed us that he had a true passion for the space and would do the job right—but it was through that wonderful event that we met and sparked the connection.”
Last summer, Ezolino worked at Vamos’ Los Angeles offices, gaining an aerial view of the industry. He continued interning through his second year in the MBA. Through Sloanies Helping Sloanies, he’s learned, “In VC, the network is a lot of your value, whether it’s developing investors or finding a sounding board for your ideas about potential investments. It’s a very social job.”
Ryder’s life has come full circle and she’s now the one geared up to champion a new grad, Ezolino, who is applying for jobs in sustainability while helping to grow the just-launched MIT Initiative for New Manufacturing.
It feels validating to help someone in many of the same ways that other Sloanies guided her on how to break into VC. She says, “Nathaniel has been so helpful to the fund, and hopefully, we’ve been just as helpful to him with skill-building and networking.”
MIT Sloan alumni looking to give back can visit the MIT Sloan CDO’s Alumni page to discover ways to support current students and stay connected.
