2026 MBA To Watch: Michael Coyne
“I want to improve people’s lives by empowering teams to do great work.”
Hometown: Golden, Colorado
Fun fact about yourself: I spent a year-and-a-half of middle school in Canada.
Undergraduate School and Degree: Georgetown University, B.S. in Foreign Service, International Political Economy
Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? DAI Global, LLC, Project Manager
Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Bain & Company, Atlanta, GA
Where will you be working after graduation? Bain & Company, Atlanta, GA, as a consultant
Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school?
The Goizueta IMPACT program is one of the more unique parts of the Goizueta curriculum; all MBA students work on a semester-long experiential learning project, delivering insights and recommendations to a real-world company sponsor. At the end of the semester, all of us (about 30 teams in total) present our work to our company sponsors, Goizueta alumni, and members of the Atlanta business community in a competition called IMPACT Showcase. I’m proud to say that my team was one of the top three teams honored at the 2025 IMPACT showcase. I worked with five of my classmates to help a major business services company better understand its customer needs and identify pathways to adding new payment options.
I decided to pursue an MBA in large part because I wanted to learn more about how I can be a better teammate and set my teams up to succeed together. Although one competition doesn’t mean I’ve “solved” these questions (indeed I think they’re things I should work on for the entirety of my career), I took my team’s recognition as proof positive that I am making real steps toward growing as a professional. I’m grateful for my teammates Sanchit Abrol, Luke Barden, Hersh Patel, Sagar Patil, and Harsh Tilwani, my faculty advisor Professor Rachel Hamilton, and my 2nd year coaching fellow Nishant Shrikhande for making this possible.
What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career?
I spent the bulk of my pre-MBA career working at DAI, a company that implements foreign aid and international development programs for governments and private companies around the world. During my time at DAI, I was part of multiple teams that executed projects for the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). After the collapse of the government of Afghanistan in 2021, I worked on a large project that provided critical livelihoods and healthcare support to people living in a truly desperate situation in that country. I am deeply grateful to have had the opportunity to do hard work with talented colleagues that that had meaningful impact on people’s lives.
Why did you choose this business school?
Part of my decision to come to Goizueta was intensely personal – my wife Rebecca is a PhD student in Emory’s psychology department, and being close to her was important to me as I thought about pursing an MBA. But I was further drawn to Goizueta because of my sense that I wouldn’t be just a number at this school. During my application process, I had the opportunity to meet with professors, students, and members of Goizueta’s Career Management Center. All those interactions made me feel that Goizueta would support me in my unique professional journey, provided I was able to articulate and advocate for my goals. After almost two years, I feel grateful for my choice, in large part due to the mentors in the Goizueta faculty, administration, and alumni community who are all familiar with me as a person and can give advice that is tailored to my needs.
Who was your favorite MBA professor?
My favorite professor at Goizueta was Reneé Dye, who teaches the core curriculum strategy course as well as multiple (very popular) electives covering corporate strategy. Professor Dye brings a truly unique perspective to class; she has had a long and successful career in management consulting but also started out as an English PhD. Her classes gave me both a strong foundation in business strategy and a broader perspective on the history of corporate America. Professor Dye expects a lot from her students, but in return she takes them seriously and invests genuinely in their success. She invests time in helping students develop a clearer idea of the value they can create in a rapidly-evolving world and is willing to leverage her own professional network so students can learn from practitioners who have lived business strategy first-hand. Professor Dye’s corporate strategy class was maybe my single best piece of preparation for working in management consulting, and elegantly synthesized multiple key concepts from business school in a way that was both satisfying and intellectually serious.
What was your favorite course as an MBA?
My favorite single course at Goizueta was Multinational Firms and Strategy, taught by Professor L.G. Thomas. We live in complex times, and Professor Thomas’ course gave students a strong baseline understanding of how modern companies navigate different countries’ legal, political, and financial institutions, while also introducing the complex and sometimes unresolved global challenges that business leaders must face.
Professor Thomas has had an extensive career and has an impressive CV, but he was still willing to put in hard work and curate a review of contemporary scholarship on evolving issues to better educate his students. I especially enjoyed our discussion of cases on the solar panel and semiconductor industries, which synthesized technological advances, market dynamics, and the realities of geopolitics. Professor Thomas’ class ultimately didn’t give students easy answers, but it did empower us to think more intelligently about the issues we’ll confront in our careers.
What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school?
In January 2026, I had the opportunity to do a short-term study abroad program at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, one of the top universities in South America. I traveled to Santiago, Chile with half a dozen of my Goizueta friends and we had a great time exploring a new country, sampling some incredible food, and brushing up on our Spanish. We took a course on business model innovation led by Professor Jorge Tarziján; I found it to be both challenging and a meaningful complement to my courses at Goizueta. Dean Brian Mitchell and Assistant Dean Harriet Ruskin do a great deal of work to develop and maintain Goizueta’s connections with leading international universities. Plus, students have the privilege of leveraging these relationships to broaden their horizons and gain global perspective that is critical to contemporary business leadership.
Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why?
I’d try to focus less on grades and more on some extracurricular commitments. I believe good business leaders should consider ways their work can impact and serve broader communities. I think there were ways I could have been more involved in some of Goizueta’s programs that engage local entrepreneurs and organizations to support the Atlanta community overall. I feel like I’ve gotten a great education at Goizueta, but I could have challenged myself more to remember that grades aren’t everything.
What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it?
During a core semester course taught by Professor Lynne Segall, we covered an HBS case called “Erik Peterson at Biometra” that resonated with me. The case discusses a recent MBA graduate’s struggle to maintain competing priorities and obligations in his first managerial role. He fails to do so in the end and experiences a professional setback.
The complicated array of responsibilities facing the protagonist felt redolent of my own career before coming back to business school, and I spent time speaking with Professor Segall in office hours trying to make sense of it. I came away with two main lessons: first, management is hard, and there’s never going to be enough time to cover all one’s bases by oneself. That means relying on others is critical, which leads to the second lesson: it’s vital to understand your team, your supporters, and your supervisors as people – not just function-fillers – and factoring their needs, communication styles, and strengths into your own decision-making is always a prerequisite to doing good work.
What did you love most about your business school’s town?
It’s hard to choose! For one, Atlanta is a great place to be if you like the outdoors. I’ve been able to get back into running during my MBA and recently completed the Publix Atlanta Half Marathon, fulfilling a lifelong goal. Atlanta has miles of great running and cycling trails and greenspace, and there’s more added every year – this makes it fun to train and build to fitness goals or just unwind after a long week. Atlanta also has an emerging food scene with dozens of great restaurants led by talented chefs. Some of my favorites are Chai Pani, Kimball House, and Delbar. There are also tons of neighborhood farmers markets which run almost the entire year and are great opportunities to find tasty and fresh local produce (remember, it’s a long growing season in Georgia).
What business leader do you admire most?
I have a lot of respect for the chef and restaurateur José Andrés. To me, he has managed to synthesize culinary talent with marketing expertise and strategic thinking to introduce innovative, creative, and accessible restaurant products that people like. My first job was in a restaurant, and I know first-hand how fickle that industry is; Andrés’ success was not a foregone conclusion, and I think speaks to the caliber of his thinking as an entrepreneur. Moreover, as someone whose pre-MBA career focused on international development and humanitarian work, I sincerely admire the work Andrés has done with the World Central Kitchen NGO. Often the most impactful work for people’s lives can only be done in the most challenging environments, and Andrés’ work with WCK shows reflects this.
What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI?
I’m taking a class this semester called Agent Based Systems that has encouraged me to engage with AI tools in a more critical and thoughtful way. This course is a new one for the Spring 2026 semester, and it’s co-taught by Professors Rajiv Garg, Wenjun Gu, and Benn Konsynski, all of whom are standout faculty in Goizueta’s Information Systems and Operations Management (ISOM) department.
So far, I’ve gotten outside my comfort zone in this class in a way that goes beyond simply reading about AI or playing around with tools as part of larger projects. Professors Garg, Gu, and Konsynski have pushed us to understand how AI agents work at a theoretical level and then put those theories into practice by planning and building our own agentic systems, introducing friction to the use of pretty frictionless tools. To me, that is a great way to prompt more thinking about what AI can do, why it is able to do this, what its limitations are, and – more generally – how emerging AI tools can impact and change ways of working in different industries. AI is evolving rapidly to be sure, but after taking this class, I feel more equipped to engage with AI intelligently after I graduate.
Which MBA classmate do you most admire?
Mackenzie Heriford seems to be everywhere at Goizueta, and she’s one of my role models. I’ve had the privilege of working with her as a teaching assistant and member of the Goizueta IMPACT board and she’s been a dedicated, thoughtful, and talented collaborator. There are numerous other people at Goizueta who could say this too. Mackenzie is a driving force behind numerous student groups, including Goizueta Women in Business, the John Lewis Institute, and Goizueta’s admissions department. Mackenzie is relentlessly positive and a trusted leader and advisor to students throughout Goizueta. She has a knack for bringing people together and inspiring them to do their best. I hope I can emulate Mackenzie in my career.
What are the top two items on your professional bucket list?
- Lead a business meeting in Spanish
- Manage a state or federal government agency
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