Category: Participants

Mischa Riedo – Winner of IMD MBA Class of 1976 Merit Scholarship

On By IMD-MBA-BlogIn Participants

I was born and raised in Berne, Switzerland but have been living and working in Zurich for the past 10 years. I’ve worked in the financial industry for most of my career. I started off in derivatives trading and then moved on to investment specialist roles for large institutional and wealthy private clients.

Prior to IMD, I co-founded and grew my own company for 3 years. We built a software application for businesses to modernize their performance review processes through real-time feedback and dynamic objectives. A lot of the learnings during these 3 years led me to apply at IMD with its focus on leadership in a very intimate and personalized setting.

I’m extremely grateful that the class of 1976 chose me as its candidate and I hope our class will set up a scholarship one day as well to support talents in the future.

Aside from work, I love exploring the world with my fiancé. Whether it’s through travelling or simply discovering new cooking or cocktail recipes, it’s always an adventure that I enjoy like none other.

In terms of IMD, my personal highlight thus far has been the strategy course with Professor Misiek Piskorski. It provided me with a myriad of insights into strategic analysis and decision-making while doing so in an entertaining and engaging manner. On the challenging side I’d note the intensity of the programme which makes it really hard to spend as much time with my fiancé as I’d like.”

Mischa Riedo
MBA 2019

Blog Team 2019: The Write Stuff

On By Surbhi PuriIn Participants3 Comments

The IMD blog helped me, and many of my peers, during the application process to the MBA program. Shout outs to the 2018 blog team; thank you for sharing your experiences with candor and humor!

Picking up the baton and upholding class tradition to share meaningful, hilarious, and sometimes trying experiences, we, the blog team of the Class of 2019, are thrilled to introduce ourselves in this post. Helena, Lukasz, Uzair and myself will helm the regular blog posts, while Adrian and Olivier are our skilled photobloggers.

We look forward to being the voice of our class and having many of our peers guest blog in the coming months.

In alphabetical order …


Adrian

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Having spent the last year in Western Australia working as an engineer I believe I’ve possibly come from furthest away for the programme. In my spare time, you would find me kitesurfing, sailing, flying my drone or taking photos. Trying to keep an open eye about new angles and perspectives, through the MBA and through my camera lens. Coming to Switzerland proved to be my 6th country of residence and am very much looking forward to seeing where post-MBA life will take me.

Helena

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Hi everyone! I am Helena from Bogota, Colombia. For the past 8 years, I have been living abroad because of my work in the oil and gas industry. It started back in 2010 when I moved to Kuwait, in 2013 I was moved to Aberdeen, Scotland where I was until 2015 when I went to Trinidad and Tobago. In 2017 I moved to Sahara Algeria up until last year before moving to Switzerland. I obviously enjoy traveling and also cooking: wherever I go I try to learn at least one recipe of local food so I can recreate at home. I’ve been living in Lausanne for almost a month and so far, I am loving my time at IMD, everything from my classmates to the incredible professors have been up to my expectations. I look forward to sharing here my experiences this year as it was through this blog and the past classes that I fell in love with IMD.

Lukasz

Screen Shot 2019-01-28 at 8.54.05 PM.pngPolish citizen by birth, long-term Swiss resident by choice and strategy consultant… also by choice ☺ Although educated in finance, spent last years helping global life sciences companies tackle their strategic challenges. ‘Staying active’ is his middle name. Hiker, biker, and jogger in summer, skier in winter. Passionate about the history of 20th century and classical guitar. Loves dogs. A lot ☺

Olivier

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I’m Olivier and feel rather representative of the average IMD MBA candidate, except that I come from Belgium. I just turned 30, got 7.5 years work experience (for the rest, refer to IMD brochure). In life, I enjoy curiosity, humor, open-mindedness, tackling challenges and killing monkey-businesses. I’m also a great fan of outdoor activities in general and more particularly trekking off-the-beaten-tracks. In the past years, I had the chance to explore Patagonia, Lapland, Nepal, and Greenland just to name a few. Last but not least, I have been a photo enthusiast for about a decade now, which is what brings me here. I particularly enjoy simple shots with pure lines, candid portraits and travel photography.

Surbhi

IMG_8276 copy.jpgHello everyone! I am Surbhi, proud Indian and third culture kid, born and raised in Dubai (I know where to find the world’s best shawarma). During my pre-MBA career over the last ten years, I was a life-sciences strategy consultant in the USA before working on patient-centricity programs focused on Africa and the Middle East. Professionally, I am passionate about bringing innovative medicines to patients and creating efficiencies in the lab-to-bedside process. I am an ardent traveler and most recently went hiking in Bhutan. I enjoy postcolonial fiction, movies, yoga, and love spending time in nature 🙂

Uzair

765e88e9-b7a9-4625-88e9-2528374124ae.JPGI’m Uzair (Uzi) & I come from the highly scenic lands of Jaipur & Hyderabad in India. Previously I was a consultant to an international NGO working in public healthcare and I have also worked for 7 years with a global pharma company. I consider myself an outdoor enthusiast who likes to experiment with new things. I have cycled the Atlantic Ocean road in Norway, Skydived in the Swiss Alps, backpacked through Cambodia, ridden a 5-trotted Icelandic horse through lava fields and traveled across 13 countries. I also train for long distance running & have participated in HM & 10K runs.

Thank you for reading our stories and for supporting us through this journey!

Surbhi

 

 

“Magic 90”

On By Surbhi PuriIn Participants2 Comments

The IMD MBA Class of 2019 WhatsApp group was born on a warm June day in 2018. The initial participants were 20 odd folk scattered across time zones. Our initial conversations revolved around polite, formal introductions, mentions of when we had travelled to someone’s country, and program administrative questions. Somewhere along the way, as summer blended into autumn, our comfort levels with each other, and the size of the group, grew. A great indicator of how our equation has evolved over the past months is the name we recently bestowed onto the chat group; “Magic 90”.

There is something magical about a group of people who never knew of each other before, now priming to develop some of the more influential relationships of our lives. The common thread? A shared desire to survive and thrive during the IMD MBA program.

We are different. Sometimes the chat is overcome by conversations in Hindi or Portuguese with the rest of us scrambling to Google Translate. On an average day we motivate each other to finish the pre-reads, discuss who makes the best cocktails, inquire about nannies and babysitting services. Some of us volunteered for a babysitting circle to help out our peers with bambinos. We’ve even discussed wardrobe requirements and shopping sales, a conversation primarily driven by the ladies! And all this shared with people we have not even met yet.

Wait, I stand corrected. Some of us have met. While transiting through Taiwan, Basel, Mumbai and Rio, our peers have met over meals and coffee, and then shared pictures with the rest. It’s almost like a blind date, but set up by IMD, and the big smiles show that a fun time was had by all. It makes
me eager to get on campus and get this show started!

We have also seen a great willingness to help out on the group. Whether someone is sharing pertinent HBR articles or sending across finance reading files that another cannot access, there is a high level of proactive giving happening in “Magic 90”. Our friends currently in Lausanne are generous with their time and wisdom. Swati and Camila, for example, have equipped us with nuggets of knowledge on Swiss door locks, grocery shopping strategies, and insurance and phone plans.

Currently, we are sharing vacation (read: pre-IMD relaxation) pictures and collectively enjoyed the IMD MBA Class of 2018 graduation live stream. As this unity grows, we’re not quite sure where our IMD journeys will take us. But if months of daily chatting are anything to go by, our virtually budding friendships are a prelude to the great times and strong bonds that lie ahead.

Surbhi

Coucou!

On By IMD-MBA-BlogIn Participants1 Comment

Our lovely Oriane Perryman-Holt, from France, offers today’s post, with some interesting stats! 

We talk about #IMDimpact so let’s measure it through “Ori’s KPIs”:

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9600 “Coucou” to great classmates with energy and enthusiasm
482 Hours debating in our team “dungeons” learning from each, other sustained by …
…578 Coffees “at Mireille” to get out of the bubble
33560 Hello & Goodbye kisses as per Swiss use of 3 each time
384 Handwritten notes on my iPad plus some drawings
91 Cases and add one third for consulting interview prep’, sure it will pay off!
123 Movenpick® ice-cream scoops this summer to fuel the 7500 meters swam in preparation for the relay triathlon, not forgetting the two 10K races
27 Different CVs reshuffling my 7-years’ experience in corporate finance and internal audit, managing international projects in 3 industries
288 Bananas as breakfast
8 Networking events to connect with the alumni – across the years, we all share the same core experience – and find a way to my dream job
2 Crypto-kitties to apply the finance class on blockchain
218 Hours consulting for a start-up and now for a Pharma company, bringing new excitement and insights
88 Classmates amazing, challenging and motivating me every day
1 Motorbike licence
0 Job yet ; enjoying the journey and curious to discover the destination

I knew this year was due to be a stretch, but I would not have anticipated all of the above.

Oriane

Bisous,

Oriane
LinkedIn

Veronika lives life on the edge

On By IMD-MBA-BlogIn Participants

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can’t see from the center.” (Kurt Vonnegut)

Typecasting millennials as fidgety adventure-seekers has become burrowed into our collective consciousness to such an extent that we barely pause to think about it anymore. But we should, to leave space for personal journeys, cultural influencers, family histories that make the generational generalities so individually unique still.

I am Veronika, the 32-year-old daughter of an artist mother and an engineer father, who themselves grew up in a different world, the Hungary of the Eastern Bloc – a country nicknamed ‘the happiest barrack’ where nonetheless travel was curtailed, and pursuing a life abroad was a thing of dreams (or a thing of carefully executed all-or-nothing, one-shot criminal offences).

I, on the other hand, grew up in a Hungary where the Berlin Wall was but a memory, sweets from the West were available even in my tiny local village corner store (so much so that ‘Fanta cheesecake’ become a well-loved family recipe), and the sorcery of Schengen not only entitled me to ­leave the country, but allowed me to study and work in London, build a career in Belgium, and start exploring the world in a way my parents never could.

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With the desire to explore, comes a hunger to understand, to dissect, to synthesize and to story-tell. These are strokes that followed me through my studies in Science & Technology, my work as Policy Officer of a space science research infrastructure, managerial functions held in Sales, IT and Business Processes at an Industrial Manufacturing company, and eventually my MBA at IMD.

Throughout my career, I’d seen a lot of what a company does on a day-to-day basis across all functional areas; I wanted to learn more about why a company does what it does, filling in the missing strategic pieces of the puzzle.

Halfway into the course I can already say I definitely found what I was looking for. I have been introduced to new perspectives, practices, and possibilities. I have travelled around the world on a Discovery Expedition, and have had the world brought to me daily by amazingly international classmates. Through lectures, team projects, and learnings from my IMD family, every day I feel more and more equipped to keep pushing boundaries – to keep as close to the edge as I can.

Veronika

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