We have been delighted to welcome our new cohort of Full-Time MBA students to Imperial College Business School as they embark upon their one-year endeavour to become future leaders.  

These students have already exemplified immense hard work and determination. They have devoted many hours in the application process, interview and GMAT preparation. Each student has been personally selected to join us on this highly competitive programme, thereby exposing everyone to a cohort of exceptional classmates.  

After an exciting range of induction activities across our South Kensington Campus, as well as our Welcome Day event at the Saatchi Gallery and Cadogan Hall, our new cohort is settling into their new routines, core modules, and for many a new place to call home. 

Full-Time MBA Academic Director, Markus Perkmann, shares his thoughts about the 2022-23 cohort:  

I would like to warmly welcome this year’s cohort! The cohort is one of the most selective and high-calibre we have had on our Full-Time MBA programme. At the same time, it brings together a great variety of impressive professional, personal and geographic backgrounds. We have updated and refreshed our programme, providing more choices, so each student can use their time at Imperial to discover and develop their interests in the specific subjects in which they want to excel in. We aim to provide an MBA experience with innovation and technology at its very core; we believe this focus benefits our graduates in any industry they are aiming to work in. And thanks to the diversity and global nature of this class, they will make connections that will last them a lifetime.

Meet some of the Full-Time MBA students in the new class

Hi everyone, my name is Ivy Chen, a Full-Time MBA candidate in the class of 2022. I received my BBA degree from the University of Michigan, Ross School of Business. I then worked mostly as a management consultant and business development and strategy manager in the financial services industry, in both the US and Singapore. While I am grateful for the diverse professional experiences I had, I knew deep down I was still searching for my true purpose. 

The turning point came when I became a first-time mother two years ago during the pandemic lockdown in London. I had a traumatic birth, and we did not have much family support, so the first year of our baby’s life was extremely hard for us. Due to the hardship, I unfortunately suffered  post-partum depression. It took me tremendous efforts, many counselling sessions, and mental strength to climb out of the dark space, which also got me thinking that there must be a better way to parent new-born babies.  

I came to the MBA programme, equipped with some entrepreneurial ideas in mind, ones that I thought could help parents in the first year of their baby’s life. So, despite that I have never been an entrepreneur before, I aspire to become a “mum-trepreneur”. This is because I believe with technology and a deep understanding of parenthood, I can help ease new parents struggles, helping them enjoy a smoother transition into a new phase of life. 

At Imperial College Business School, MBA students are trained and encouraged to think like an entrepreneur, challenging the status quo by always looking for a better solution to long-standing problems. To realise my aspiration, I have chosen and enjoyed many entrepreneurial types of modules, such as Entrepreneurial Journey, Imperial Innovation Challenge, AI ventures, Entrepreneurial Finance, and the Global Digital Opportunities elective, which was taught in Israel as a collaborated module between the Business School and Tel Aviv University. Imperial has helped me tremendously as it is a school that promotes science and technology, encouraging business students to support and lead the commercialisation effort and solve global problems through science and technology.  

In addition, at the Business School, I was able to find like-minded fellow entrepreneurs and together we are now working on an AI powered parenting app called “Baby Don’t Cry”, that aims to proactively decipher why baby cries with a course of recommended action for parents. Our mission is to promote a world with less cries, a tighter family bond, and peace of mind for everyone! We have put countless hours into the customer discovery, business model design, and business plan. With our hard work, we are honoured to be awarded the “Grand Challenge Prize”, as part of the MBA Entrepreneurial Journey Module with a grant of £1,500 to further advance our venture.  

We also have been actively engaged with the Imperial Enterprise Lab and have been selected to participate in the highly competitive Summer Accelerator programme. We are currently working closely with industry experts, startup mentors, and business coaches to test our hypothesis, refine our solution, iterate the business plan, and craft our “demo-day” pitch. By the end of the accelerator, we hope we will be able to launch our MVP and test it with our first customers.  

Special shout out to our amazing Baby Don’t Cry Team, Daren Tan, Michelle Tang, Afifah Ayub, Valentina Tobon!  

Ollie: Sounds like a fantastic event. We've said before how much we love these projects that bring together Business Schools from across the globe, it really enhances the experience for all involved. From taking part in all of these events and being a part of the committee that organises them, what have you gained from this experience?

Healthcare: Being a member of the club provides a unique opportunity to improve leadership, organisational and managerial skills. Further, the continuous synergetic collaboration between club executives, broadens each of our perspectives, not only in the healthcare field but also on overall team capabilities. With each new event, we learnt how to better organise events, take on new responsibilities and offer greater value to other members which in turn increases our motivation to improve the Business School community. Last but not least, being a member gives an unparalleled opportunity to connect and network with industry leaders!

Ollie: Excellent, I'm glad you've managed to get so much out of the experience. My last question, as always, is what would you say to a future student considering joining an IB Career Club?

Healthcare: Becoming a member of one of the IB Career clubs is joining the vibrant, diverse, and collaborative hub for individuals who want to embrace exciting opportunities, foster new relationships and contribute to the broader Imperial College Business School community. IB Careers clubs present a unique opportunity to improve knowledge about a particular professional industry or geographical region that students are interested in, meet new friends and connect with industry leaders

Follow the Healthcare Club on Instagram and LinkedIn. Don’t hesitate to reach out for more information! You can contact them via ibhealthcareclub@imperial.ac.uk if you have any questions.

We are excited that you are considering applying for our new BSc Economics, Finance and Data Science course at Imperial College Business School. One of the things you will be wondering about is how to show your enthusiasm and suitability for the degree in your UCAS personal statement. In this blog, I will provide some pointers and, hopefully, reassurance.

The challenge

Let us start with the big challenge you face. You need to write one personal statement, when you are applying to up to five courses, potentially across five universities. We know that it is highly unlikely that all the options on your personal statement will be economics + finance + data science. We are not looking for students who specifically say they are only interested in studying a course with this combination of subjects, although an interest in this combination would be nice!

Hopefully, this will reassure those wondering how to write a statement that is relevant for multiple courses with different combinations of economics, finance, data science, philosophy, politics, business studies, geography, maths, computer science, and many other subjects. Of course, it is best not to signal that you are only interested in studying politics, philosophy and economics or pure maths or that you dream of studying at a particular institution or in a specific city.

We are looking for applicants who have a strong preference to study our degree, but we understand you may need to be nuanced in how you present your interest.

What we are looking for

We will be assessing your application (grade predictions; past grades; reference letter; and personal statement) in the round. There are six things that we are looking for from potential students. They are:

• Bright with strong academic achievements
• Excited by, and have strong potential for, analytical problem solving
• Curious to use economics and/or finance to explore evolving challenges in commercial, policy or third sector contexts
• Passionate to learn how to use data analysis and cutting-edge technique to examine economics and/or finance questions
• A motivated and engaged learner who works well independently and with others, with strong communication skills

Your job is to convince us that you have evidence that you meet these criteria. This is where you get to tell your story in a way that works for your application. 

How to tell your story

Try to go beyond your grades, show your curiosity and let us know what makes you stand out from an academic perspective.

There are a multitude of ways to evidence your curiosity about the different subjects in our degrees, including but not limited to:

• Subjects chosen at school
• Projects that you have worked on
• Talks that you have attended or listened to online
• Books you have read
• Ideas you have had about the relevance of these subjects to business and policy

Again, just to reassure, you can demonstrate your curiosity about all three areas, but convincing evidence of curiosity about just one of the areas or any combination of the three will also be well regarded.

It is also worth emphasising that we do not expect you to have studied the subjects before the course. Our requirement is that you come with strong mathematical skills which will put you in a strong position to learn economics, finance, and data science to a high level in the degree.

An effective way to show us you are suitable for the BSc Economics, Finance and Data Science is to hone in on the areas that are common across our course modules: strong quantitative skills and the ability to use those skills to analyse and solve problems.

Applicants who love to work on a new challenge or situation and who use quantitative techniques to find relevant solutions are what we are looking for. This can be demonstrated, for example, through your choice of academic subjects in school, participation in extra-curricular activities and competitions or a story that explains how you solved a new problem in your life. Evidence of you learning how to use technology to support your problem solving is also a nice touch!

You will have your own way of showing us that you are motivated, using examples of times when you were driven to succeed. Similarly, personal stories that show your ability to develop your learning skills (‘learn how to learn’), working independently and with others, will be important. This will help us see that you are likely to succeed in our course, given the need to take ownership of your learning, work independently and engage with group work during your three years.

Our final criterion is communication. How you write the statement will tell us a lot. You can also provide wider evidence of your skills in delivering presentations, writing diverse types of outputs, and listening to others.

Every applicant is unique, and we encourage you to show us what makes you a strong candidate in your personal statement. Of course, if you are invited to interview, we will want to explore your motivation to study the three subject areas together and will dig deeper into how you match what we are looking for.

I hope this helps you shape your statement and wish you well in preparing your application!

When considering a university application, the first aspect most students fixate on is how well their respective universities perform on various ranking tables. Comparisons are often made on the Complete University Guide or Times Higher Education, and the most common discussion in a Sixth Form classroom revolves around Is it in the top 10? or Does it have high graduate prospects? 

Imperial College London is widely considered (and ranked) as one of the top five universities in the UK. So, what else? Here are five more important aspects which are often overlooked during the application process which I feel are extremely important in making this decision – coming from myself, an undergraduate student at Imperial. 

1. Student community support 

Courses at Imperial College London are designed to pique your academic interest. They push you to learn a wide variety of content in equally as much depth. Coupled with cutting-edge research and up-to-date case studies, it ensures that upon completion you will have an in-demand skill set that is relevant to employers.

This however, at times, can be challenging. Therefore, an important aspect is the welfare and support available to students, which at Imperial, is second to none. Although I have only been part of this community, I now call home, for six months, as an Intercalated BSc student, already feel so welcomed by both staff and students. Regarding any issues, the welfare staff are always at hand, and only an email away.  

2. Extra-curricular activities  

In addition to the core course learnings, there are immense prospects to take forward any aspects of the course which you find most interesting. These can simply be in the form of extra research to publishing research articles in high-quality journals.

Aside from the course, there are incredible opportunities to take part in more industry learning. For example, recently I attended ProductCon, the largest management conference in the world, where I felt inspired to hear from speakers of FTSE 100 and S&P 500 companies regarding their future.  

Horizons is the Centre for Languages, Culture & Communication's flagship programme for undergraduates. It offers all students to learn a new skill, such as a modern language or creative writing.  

The Enterprise Lab offers an accelerator programme that offers expertise and funding to bring a product idea you have to life. This year, the winner of the Venture Catalyst Challenge, run by the Enterprise Lab, created a ‘plastic alternative from seafood waste that breaks down in any natural environment, allowing consumers to throw away their waste worry-free’. By taking part in both the course and these extra-curricular opportunities, you are able to not only develop core knowledge, but you also gain soft skills such as teamworking, presenting and leadership.    

Furthermore, there are over 380 sports clubs and societies on offer from American Football and the Comedy Society to Water Polo and Yoga, that allow you to connect to a whole range of people with similar interests, even if you didn’t know that you had them. 

3. The faculty  

The lecturers at Imperial are among the best in the world. These are professors at the very top of their fields and have a genuine interest in teaching. The lectures are informative, interactive and engaging. They also allow for natural discussion to grow and encourage innovative thinking.

However, and most importantly, they want to help. Many faculty members host regular drop-in sessions and are quick to reply to emails offering solutions to problems you may encounter. They also invite some of the best guest lectures to supplement textbook learning with real-life examples. For example, the CEO of iDal, Mariya Grinina, recently gave an honest talk about the truth of being an entrepreneur and the challenges she faced in growing her business.

4. The facilities  

The Business School has some of the best facilities on offer for its students. Group study spaces or ‘Vaults’ are kitted out with whiteboards and monitors to allow efficient ideation sessions for group projects.  

As part of the wider university, Ethos is the gym and swimming pool located just across the road. It’s free during off-peak hours and only £40 a year for unlimited access. There is also a huge variety of food available both inside the campus and around South Kensington will ensure that you can have something new every day, and if that wasn’t enough, you can always bring a packed lunch and eat it in Hyde Park, which is just up the road! 

5. Social events 

Events take place in a huge variety of cool locations around London, however the two which are most memorable, are the Natural History Museum welcome party and Graduation. The welcome party takes place inside the Natural History Museum. The museum closes its doors to the public and allows the Business School Community to take pictures, mingle and dance under the 25.2-metre-long blue whale skeleton. With all staff and students present, it is the perfect introduction to the family.

Graduation, which comes a lot quicker than you think, marks the completion of your studies. To celebrate this occasion, Imperial students dress in gowns and pointy caps, and receive their degree scrolls in a ceremony conducted at Royal Albert Hall, making it probably the coolest place to end your time at university.  

Written by Paddy Hanrahan, Strategy & Innovation Director at Helpforce

I spent the first leg of my career at Accenture, a global management consultancy, where I progressed to Managing Director level. I look upon my time there as an A-Z grounding in leadership and management. Over 13 years, I learned excellent skills such as client engagement, people management, digital transformation, and delivering system change.

In 2014 I took a sabbatical, and travelled around California with my wife and nine-month old son. It was during this time that I realised I wanted to do something completely different with the rest of my career. I wanted to devote myself to social change; to use my digital skills to better expose the impact that charities make and my system change skills to do that on a far greater scale.

Since that moment, I’ve helped launch two new charities which have grown and become established UK organisations. With my current employer Helpforce, we’re trying to transform how health and care is delivered through greater involvement of volunteers and communities, and to help manage increasing demand amid an understaffed and underperforming health and social care system.

Volunteering is not a space often associated with innovation by leaders within the NHS and social care. But Helpforce has changed that. We saw that the lack of evidence around the impact of volunteers was holding back the investment and growth of health volunteering. In response we created the Insight & Impact Service, which helps simplify the evaluation process for our clients. In helping them to collect far more data, in turn, we can convert this into evidence against outcomes that health leaders care about.

I had always seen innovation as a natural part of my digital transformation remit - that the two go hand in hand - but there was room for improving my understanding of what makes a successful innovation and, crucially, how we could better use design thinking as an organisation to develop more effective client services within Helpforce.

I researched several similar courses but chose Imperial College Business School’s Innovation: A Design Thinking Approach Executive Education programme due to the institution’s strong brand, the fact that they were offering the course in-person (versus virtual), and the excellent reports I got from course alumni I reached out to.

Ultimately, Helpforce is trying to deliver change in the form of volunteering projects that make a significant impact on people and services, at scale. My hope was that this course could not only improve how we develop innovation within our organisation, but also how we could extend that to our clients (those leading volunteers and volunteer projects at the ‘front line’) to help them innovate themselves.

Following completion of the course there are three main take away ideas that I will look to implement in Helpforce:

Innovation means more than having a good idea - it’s about building a scalable commercial model

Innovation is an overused term these days. How many times per day do we hear a new technology or concept described as “innovative”, “disruptive” or “a game changer?”

On day one of the course we discussed what makes an innovation. Is it an idea? A solution to a problem? Is it something new? Is it something that can scale and make an impact?

The answer is that it’s all of these things. But, crucially, an innovation must also become a successful commercial model. Your proposal must be something so useful, so valuable, that a large number of customers must want to pay for it.

This wasn’t obviously applicable to Helpforce in that we do not have customers and we do not charge for our services. However, by replacing “customers” for “users”, and “pay” for “user value”, this perspective holds completely true.

The importance of Design Research from the very start, and understanding users’ emotions

The course took the 25 course participants firmly out of their comfort zone on the second day by sending us out into the streets of London to talk to random people. It’s never easy approaching strangers, and certainly not in London!

Our goal was to undertake ‘design research’ with target users. Unlike market research which asks very structured questions of a large audience, design research aims to do insightful digging with a smaller user group. Your questions aim to get to their emotions… the frustrations and pain points, and the things that make life better and easier.

The benefit of design research is that it’s done right at the very start – well before you even have any idea around what the possible solutions to the challenge could be. From all of the peers I spoke to on the course it was this approach that was the most radical take away, rather than conducting market research to validate a solution you’ve already developed further down the line. It is certainly something which will improve how we work within Helpforce, as it will enable us to provide truly tailored health and care initiatives that go straight to the heart of what our users need.

Innovation must involve everyone

Later in the course we explored how corporations best embrace innovation. What became clear is that it won’t work just by placing the responsibility on an “Innovation Lead” or department. Innovation is best delivered when it is embedded within the culture and workings of your organisation.

Whether user, customer, employee, manager or supplier - everyone needs to be involved. That user input from the design research needs to be the source and master reference point for all innovation development. And who better than the staff to come up with the ideas and solutions?

I will soon pass on what I’ve learned to the Helpforce team and embed ‘design thinking’ in how we work, and am looking forward to seeing how we can extend this way of working to our many clients across health and care.

This article was originally published on The Economist.

Ollie: Good luck with those final events and enjoy them! Lastly, what would you say to a future student considering joining one of the IB Careers clubs?

Finance Club: Joining an IB Careers Club is an exciting opportunity to realise your vision for what Imperial College Business School should look like. The freedom of organising events is a challenging but highly rewarding undertaking that will certainly enhance your experience at the school. One of the greatest benefits is also to interact with people from all across the school and build your network. It also helps you enhance important soft skills and provides an opportunity to leave a legacy behind you.

Follow the Finance Club on Instagram and LinkedIn. Don’t hesitate to reach out for more information! You can contact them via ibfinanceclub@imperial.ac.uk if you have any questions.