Three Women, One Darden Legacy

“For the record, I now understand why Mom watches CNBC for fun. I had to go through Darden to get that.”

Rachel Edwards (MBA ’22) and her sister, Natalie Cellura (EMBA ’26), found more in common than ever with their mom, Karen Kosiba Edwards (MBA ’84), after following in her footsteps and earning their MBAs at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business.

Karen did not set out to create a family legacy. But nearly four decades after she graduated as one of relatively few women in her class, both of her daughters found their own reasons to choose Darden.

Now, as three women Darden graduates in one immediate family, they understand one another in a new way. They laugh about what they call their shared “Darden trauma.” They have all experienced the late nights, difficult cases and pressure to participate in class, even when they were not entirely sure they had the right answer.

More importantly, they have each experienced what Karen has always seen as one of Darden’s greatest strengths: a community that continues long after graduation.

Karen: Finding Her People

Karen came to Darden after studying French literature as an undergraduate, with little formal business training. At the time, Darden was still building its reputation. Karen was living in Virginia and applied only to Darden.

“In retrospect, I probably should have looked more broadly,” she said. “But I’m so glad that’s where I ended up.”

The transition from French literature to the case method was not easy. Marketing, organizational behavior and communication came naturally to her. Accounting, statistics and finance did not.

Karen remembers sitting between a certified public accountant who arrived with a briefcase full of sharpened pencils and a nuclear engineer who brought logarithmic graph paper to class. He would nudge her and encourage her to speak up. She, meanwhile, often left class feeling very stressed.

“I would leave the building and go home and cry because I was so lost,” she said.

The amount of work was unlike anything she had experienced. Students attended class five days a week, completed calculations by hand and turned in typed papers. Once a month, they had a paper due at 5 p.m. on Saturday that they often could not begin until Friday night. She described the curriculum to her liberal arts friends as “taking five brand-new languages at once.”

Still, she loved the people.

“It was the smartest, funniest group of people I’d ever been with in my life,” she said.

Those classmates became a constant throughout Karen’s career. A Darden graduate hired her into her first finance role at a small investment bank in Washington, D.C. Years later, another Darden connection led to an opportunity to help launch the investment bank, Friedman, Billings, Ramsey & Co. (“FBR”) when Rachel was only 10 months old.

Following investment banking, Karen turned to wealth management and consulting before beginning a later-career chapter in executive search. Along the way, she hired Darden graduates, turned to alumni for advice and maintained friendships she formed decades earlier.

Karen also eventually returned to Darden in a volunteer capacity, serving on and later chairing the Alumni board before joining the Darden School Foundation Board of Trustees.

Her daughters grew up around the friendships she had formed at Darden. Both of their godmothers are Darden graduates, and Karen’s alumni engagement over the past two decades grew the family’s connections to the School.

Karen believes seeing those relationships, as much as seeing her career, shaped her daughters’ impressions of Darden.

Rachel: From Fashion to Finance and Back to Entrepreneurship

Rachel began her career in fashion, working in retail and at a fashion tech startup before launching her own personal styling company. After running the business for three years, she started wondering what she might want to do next.

Business school seemed like a way to explore a different direction, and Darden had been part of the conversation in her family for most of her life.

“I know my mom likes to think she didn’t influence us,” Rachel said. “But of course, you hear how hard the experience was, how great the connections were and witness all the opportunities that came out of it.”

Rachel had seen how much her mother valued her Darden friendships and wanted to build that kind of community for herself. She also knew she wanted to change careers, even if she did not yet know what the next one would be.

She initially considered the Executive MBA program so she could continue running her company. Then the COVID-19 pandemic changed both her business and her plans.

Rachel applied to the Full-Time MBA program in April 2020, learned she had been admitted in May and moved to Charlottesville in June.

“It all happened very fast,” she said.

Her Darden experience looked different from her mother’s. Much of her First Year took place under pandemic restrictions, but Rachel said the School still found ways for students to learn together and build relationships in person.

Like Karen, she also found the coursework humbling.

Rachel entered with a communications background and experience running a company, but that did not mean she felt comfortable in finance class.

“I had a lot to learn, and it was an uphill battle,” she said. “Fortunately, I was surrounded by an incredible learning team, with people who brought different strengths, perspectives, and skill sets to the table.”

As part of her plan to make a career change, she explored entrepreneurship and venture capital, completing internships with several funds while continuing to run her styling business.

One friend from her Darden Before Darden learning team even helped her value the company before she sold it following graduation.

By the spring of her Second Year, Rachel still did not have a job lined up. Then a recruiter from JPMorgan contacted her about joining a team within the investment bank that was building a technology platform for startups.

At first, Rachel thought the message might be spam. Banking was not the career she had imagined for herself. But the team was specifically looking for people with entrepreneurial backgrounds.

“I never would have worked at JPMorgan had I not gone to Darden,” she said.

The role took her to New York, where she spent two years working with the team and found another Darden community inside the company. Classmates and more senior Darden graduates became friends and mentors.

She eventually left JPMorgan and returned to entrepreneurship. Rachel is now the founder of Gravely, a startup helping families navigate the practical and emotional complexities of end of life. The idea grew out of her own experience supporting her family alongside her sister following their father’s death last year.

Once again, Darden is part of the story as one of Gravely’s early angel investors is also a Darden alumnus.

Rachel has also followed her mother into alumni leadership. About a year after graduating, she joined the alumni board, which she described as a “passing of the torch.” She has returned to speak to students, stayed in touch with professors and co-taught a course on prototyping and product development.

When she moved from New York to Austin, Texas, last year, Rachel turned to the alumni network to begin building a community in a new city.

“If you look for connections and ask for introductions, they’re there,” she said. “It is such an incredible network and community if you really lean into it.”

Natalie: Taking Darden Straight to Work

Natalie took a different route to both business and Darden.

She studied economics and art history as an undergraduate and set her sights on a job in cultural heritage protection with an organization like UNESCO. She moved to Rome, taught ancient Roman history to high school students at St. Stephen’s School and earned a master’s degree in cultural heritage while working full time.  

When Natalie began working at a creative consulting firm founded by one of her professors, she discovered that she loved helping to build and grow the business.

She later joined Lapine Group, a boutique management consulting firm, working remotely from Rome.

As Natalie became more committed to consulting, she started to feel that she was missing some of the classic strategy tools and business frameworks used by her more experienced colleagues. She was also considering a move back to the United States after almost five years abroad.

By then, Rachel had attended Darden, and Natalie had seen the School’s effect on both her sister and her mother.

“I really wanted to be part of that experience,” she said.

The Executive MBA format allowed Natalie to continue working and immediately put what she was learning into practice. It also enabled her and her husband to settle in New York, where they could both continue building their careers. 

Natalie started Darden in her late 20s and initially worried that she might not have as much to contribute as classmates who were further along in their careers.

Some had extensive military and leadership backgrounds. One had been a lead hostage negotiator. Others had been fighter pilots.

“They can be very intimidating,” Natalie said, before adding, “And very tall.”

She soon realized that her own experience working internationally, conducting business in Italian and consulting across several industries gave her a perspective worth sharing.

The hardest part of the program was not one particular subject. It was managing the demands of work, school and life all at once.

“You have to become a brilliant time manager because otherwise you cannot get it all done,” she said.

Her learning team, LT12, helped make it possible. Before monthly residency weekends, the group sometimes prepared for as many as 16 cases at once. They met nearly every weeknight leading up to class.

Even after their core courses ended and they moved into different electives, the group continued meeting. The conversations shifted from cases to professional goals, job searches and other parts of their lives.

“We became an accountability group for each other because we loved spending time together,” Natalie said.

Natalie also saw the value of the Executive MBA format play out at work. During her two years at Darden, she hired additional strategists, introduced the team’s first AI tools and helped establish Lapine Group’s first team in Latin America. 

She also designed and led monthly work sessions for her team, bringing new strategy frameworks and a design-thinking mindset back to the firm as she was learning them.

“One of the values of a transformative experience like Darden,” Natalie said, “is that you truly don’t know going into it exactly what you’re going to get — or who you’re going to be — on the other side. I’m living that right now.”

A Common Language

Karen, Rachel and Natalie attended Darden at different times, entered with different backgrounds and chose different MBA formats.

Still, they recognize parts of their own experiences in one another.

All three remember feeling intimidated in the classroom. All three learned to speak up even when they were unsure. And all three relied on classmates to help them through the hardest parts.

For Karen, the experience came at a time when women made up about 20% of her class and there were only two women on the faculty.

Rachel’s time at Darden helped prepare her for the male-dominated world of investment banking after years of working mostly with women in fashion.

Natalie sometimes found herself among only three or four women in an elective course. At first, she hesitated to participate, but her classmates encouraged her to speak until she became one of the more vocal people in the room.

Their Darden experiences were not identical, but they gave the three women what Karen calls “a common language and a common triumph.”

Rachel prefers “trauma bonding.”

“It brings us closer together, having that shared experience,” Rachel said. “It’s special.”

Now, they share more than a School and a degree. They understand the cases, the cold calls, the friendships and even why their mom watches CNBC for fun.