Claire Babin (MME '26)

Name: Claire Babin

Hometown:  Larose, LA

Program: Masters of Management in Energy

Concentration or Specialization: Entrepreneurship

Following graduation, what’s on the horizon for you professionally?

After graduation, I will be joining Callais Capital as an Entrepreneur in Residence and building my venture, Beaux Terre. 

Who was your favorite business professor and why?

John Foreman III and Marshall Carver. It is impossible to separate them. Between the two of them, I learned what it actually means to think under pressure. Professor Foreman pushed me to think like a trader: fast, probabilistic, and comfortable with uncertainty. Professor Carver stretched me as a systems thinker in ways that changed how I read markets and models. Together they made me harder to rattle and sharper under pressure, which is exactly what this industry demands.

What was your favorite business course? Why was it your favorite?

Energy Trading with John Foreman III. I came into Freeman thinking analytically, but this course taught me to think dynamically, how to hold a position and know the difference between noise and a real shift in the market. It was the first time I felt the gap close between academic frameworks and how decisions actually get made in the field. I left that course a different kind of thinker.

What’s the most important thing you learned at Freeman?

The most important thing I learned at Freeman was how to fail productively. My first real venture idea was a failure. I spent late afternoons in the Lepage Center, financial models, pitch decks, the whole thing. It didn’t work. But somewhere in that first attempt, I figured out how to think like a trader and a risk manager: hold the uncertainty, stress-test the assumptions, and don’t fall in love with the idea so much that you can’t see it clearly. Freeman didn’t hand me a winning idea, but it gave me a process for building them and the resilience to start again when they don’t. That’s worth more than any model I ever worked on. 

What’s your favorite New Orleans memory?

There’s a guy who’s out every day by the Church’s Chicken on Claiborne just vibing. Every day on my way home, I wave to him and he waves back. One afternoon a chicken crossed the road right in front of him. That’s the NOLA spirit.