Executive MBA student says program inspired a different vision of the future

Talk to Marina Kalpouzos about her business career and the word “impact” is bound to come up in the conversation.

It’s clear that the Rutgers Business School student, now in her final semester of the Executive MBA program, doesn’t just want to succeed; she wants to make a lasting impression.

That’s certainly why she chose to pursue her Rutgers masters in chemical engineering, with a concentration in pharmaceutical engineering. Her idea then was to get a job in the pharmaceutical industry as an engineer, but three years into a role that entailed, among other things, creating a cleanroom for drug manufacture at the multinational pharma company Novartis, she realized that “there’s only so much of an impact you can have as an individual contributor.” In the last year she pivoted, moving into a position at the company as a capital projects engineer. In that role, she’s responsible for planning and overseeing capital projects, like building or upgrading facilities and expanding production capacity.

Kalpouzos decided to pursue a Rutgers EMBA as part of her goal, she said, “to transition toward more of a leadership position and a higher-impact role.” But as she progressed in the EMBA program, forces converged that would change her vision of the future. 

“Meeting so many talented people who are also working hard in their careers and their own businesses opened my eyes to the possibility that I could start a business of my own,” she said. Already open to the idea of pivoting, the program seemed to be encouraging her to alter course yet again. 

Her eyes weren’t just opened through exposure to her cohort. Kalpouzos participated in a 10-day summer residency program in Japan that had her taking part in seminars with Japanese business and government leaders, visiting factories and research-and-development centers and labs, and diving into Japanese culture. The International Experience, a 3-credit course in the EMBA program, Kalpouzos said, “helped me see the world through a different lens. It was beautiful to see that we’re all in the same world but we sometimes take very different approaches. It helped me appreciate the differences.”

Back at home, she was already applying this and other Rutgers Business School experiences toward her first entrepreneurial venture. Last year she and her husband decided to open a coffee shop, Roast’d Coffee, in downtown Montclair. Although the shop is, strictly speaking, her husband’s business, Kalpouzos is clearly making an impact there as well. “I’m still working in industry in my nine-to-five,” she said – not to mention working toward her EMBA – but off hours, I’m supporting the back-end operations of the coffee shop.”

Meanwhile, her simmering idea of founding a business of her own heated up when she took a marketing class in which one of the assignments was to come up with a business idea. Kalpouzos’s thoughts naturally turned toward one of her own experiences—specifically, the time two years earlier when the hot water heater broke down just as she was moving into a new house. Now, she wondered if there might be a way to help others avoid this and other exigencies of home ownership.

“So what that looks like,” she explained, “is to have a home care partner in making sure that all of your household systems that you rely on are working appropriately—essentially, moving away from reacting to failures to preventing them.” She’s currently developing the idea for real-world application. 

Nevertheless, she doesn’t plan to abandon her corporate goals in the process. “In five years,” she said, “I see myself having both my corporate career advancing toward that executive level role, as well as having my business off the ground and set up in a way that I can support both—meaning that I have a team running the business and I’m there on only an as-needed basis.”

There’s every chance she can pull it off. Farrokh Langdana, director of the Rutgers EMBA program, catalogs Kalpouzos’s qualifications as “a rock-solid engineering undergraduate platform, amazing leadership skills and business acumen, awesome presentation skills and personality, and a spirit of entrepreneurship.” With all of those, not to mention an Executive MBA, she’s sure to continue making an impact wherever she sets her sights.

-Leslie Garisto