For Sarah Nielsen ’14 MBA, ’14 MESc, the memory of receiving her acceptance letter from the Yale School of Management in 2012 still gives her goosebumps. When it arrived, the letter was accompanied by a note that she would be an inaugural recipient of the Yale SOM Veterans Scholarship if she decided to attend. “At the time, I was in the process of adapting to not being in the military anymore, but the Army was still very much a part of my identity,” she recalls. “To have that identity welcomed in this way by Yale told me that, despite my lack of experience in the business world, they saw something in me, and they really wanted me there.”
The scholarship offered to Nielsen was made possible by a gift from Maurice Pinto ’55 to support US Veterans at the school. Pinto served as a lieutenant in the US Army in West Germany from 1955 to 1957 after graduating from Yale College. Following his service, he pursued an MBA at Harvard and then devoted his life to investing in and building businesses.
Pinto focused his philanthropic giving during his lifetime on making educational opportunities available to others who served in the military. He looked forward to his visits to Evans Hall each year to meet with veteran scholarship recipients and is remembered for the encouraging words he shared with them. When Pinto died in 2021, he left a significant bequest to Yale to further support the Yale SOM Veterans Scholarship Fund.
Today, these scholarships continue to have a transformative impact on the professional and personal lives of recipients during their time at SOM and beyond. “When you go straight from college into the Army, you learn so much about leadership and geopolitics, but you don’t necessarily learn about career options. Your whole world is the military. My years at Yale SOM gave me an understanding of how businesses and NGOs operate,” says Nielsen, who worked in management consulting and then for Michigan’s largest electric and gas utility company after graduating. “Yale SOM seems totally unique to me as a business school in the way it honors and replicates the same sense of service that inspired me to join the military. After all, having a positive impact on society is written right into the school’s mission statement.”