Fifty-two years ago this September, I drove my 1970 yellow Karmann Ghia convertible from Philadelphia to Boston to enter the MBA class of 1976 at Harvard Business School.\u00a0 I was one of 106 women who graduated \u2014 almost 15% of the class \u2014 up from 86 the year before.\u00a0 The school had begun admitting women to its full-time MBA program in 1963.\u00a0 That first group was known as the original eight.<\/p>\n
I still remember standing in line to register for classes while representatives from major banks offered us credit cards.\u00a0 This was a big deal.\u00a0 In 1974, a woman generally couldn\u2019t get a credit card in her own name.<\/p>\n
The business school culture was male and money, which felt foreign to me.\u00a0 I had been working for a small Philadelphia urban real estate developer where I wore jeans to work.\u00a0 At HBS, the men wore nice pants and blue blazers, the women wore blouses with bows.\u00a0 Many of my classmates had come from jobs at Fortune 500 companies, banking and consulting, and the school seemed focused on turning out leaders in those industries \u2014 while I dreamed of a career in journalism.\u00a0 A few male classmates told me I was only there to find a husband or that I was taking the place of a qualified man.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
The school used the case method that included the \u201ccold call.\u201d\u00a0 You read about a problem being confronted by a particular company, and the professors call on you whether or not your hand is raised.\u00a0 It was terrifying.\u00a0 It was also, I came to understand, one of the great gifts of my education.\u00a0 It taught me to raise my hand \u2014 and to keep it up.<\/p>\n
For all my awkwardness, the school gave me extraordinary things: world-class faculty, classmates from all over the globe, and the ability to create my own course, Business and the Media, when nothing in the catalog matched my interest.\u00a0 I graduated in the middle of the class, but I was then and forever an alum.<\/p>\n
![\"Barbara](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/SUT-L-BRY-0726-01.jpg\")
Barbara Bry, pictured here in 1974, remembers standing in line to register for classes at Harvard Business School while representatives from major banks offered credit cards. This was a big deal, she said. In 1974, a woman generally couldn\u2019t get a credit card in her own name. (Barbara Bry)<\/p>\n
In June, my husband Neil and I returned to campus for my 50th reunion.\u00a0 I walked across Soldiers Field with a mix of nostalgia, pride and disbelief that five decades had passed since I drove my yellow convertible to Boston.\u00a0 So much has changed.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Women now make up almost half of every entering class.\u00a0 The school\u2019s view of its mission has broadened to recognize that careers are fluid \u2014 that graduates may move among business, government and the nonprofit world over a lifetime.\u00a0 Today, the school\u2019s stated mission is to educate leaders who make a difference in the world.\u00a0 I don\u2019t remember what the mission was in 1974, but I suspect it had more to do with large corporations and making money.\u00a0 At least that was the vibe I felt.<\/p>\n
Some things haven\u2019t changed: the commitment to excellence and to be at the forefront of whatever is coming next.\u00a0 Today, that means artificial intelligence \u2014 how to weave it into the curriculum and into the practice of leadership.\u00a0 I was impressed by a new program, Foundry<\/a>, which uses AI to propel a community of entrepreneurs from early-stage ideas or research to launch.\u00a0 The entrepreneurs also meet in person, and the program participants come from universities and accelerators all over the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n I have attended every reunion but one, and over 50 years, the conversations have traced the arc of our lives.\u00a0 At the early reunions, we talked about our careers \u2014 who had made partner, who had started a company, who was running what.\u00a0 In the middle years, the talk turned to families, children and community service.\u00a0 At this one, the conversation was about legacy: what we want to do with the years we have left and what we hope to leave behind.<\/p>\n At a moving memorial service, we remembered the classmates who are no longer with us, and we are keenly aware that others are very sick.\u00a0 I felt grateful for the alumni with whom I reconnected, and for the time we still have.<\/p>\n Fifty years later, I can see clearly what that uncomfortable young woman in jeans learned.\u00a0 I learned to raise my hand.\u00a0 I learned resilience, which carried me through a divorce and through the leap of becoming an entrepreneur in my 40s and then elected office in my 60s.\u00a0 I graduated determined to make the path easier for the women who came after me \u2014 which led me to start Athena Stem <\/a>\u00a0and Run Women Run<\/a>.\u00a0 The 15% of us in the class of 1976 could not have imagined a school where today women fill almost half the seats.\u00a0 But we hoped for it, we worked for it, and we got to see it.<\/p>\n It turns out that the case method is good preparation for life.\u00a0 You get cold-called, whether your hand is up or not, by markets, by illness, by loss, by change.\u00a0 The trick is to raise it anyway, at every age, for whatever chapter comes next.<\/p>\n