Meet The London Business School MBA Class of 2017

Barty Pleydell-Bouverie 

London Business School 

Hometown: Oxford, UK 

Undergraduate School and Major (Include Graduate School if Relevant):

University of Oxford – Experimental Psychology (undergrad)

University of Oxford – Neuroscience (MSc & PhD) 

Employers and Job Titles Since Graduation: Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI) – started at Analyst level, progressed to Senior Coordinator, then Program Manager 

Recalling your own experience, what advice do you have for applicants who are preparing for either the GMAT or the GRE? In my opinion, these tests are actually a very good reflection of quant and English language ability, and – maybe perversely – this leads me to conclude that they shouldn’t be sweated too severely. Of course, you want to make sure that you’re in a position to do as well as you can. This will mean that you must learn or refresh the key skills and concepts to a point at which you are fully comfortable answering questions on them. But beyond this, I think these tests can be over-thought. In my experience, the real threat to performance is exam-day stress. If you can be happy with what you know, and feel sufficiently prepared to answer questions on this without panicking, then you are probably in a good place for the test to accurately reflect your true competency. On the other hand, if you wind yourself up worrying about doing better than you ‘can’, then you are likely to underperform relative to your true ability.

Based on your own selection process, what advice do you have for applicants who are trying to draw up a list of target schools to which to apply? I used four criteria when selecting a school. At the end of the process, London Business School was effectively the only option left standing:

• Quality of the school/course: These days, competition amongst MBA grads is fierce, so being admitted to a high-quality school where competition for places was equally fierce will reflect well on you. As importantly, good schools tend to have good teaching. In my case, I felt that the content I wanted to learn was every bit as important as the network etc, Given that I am a firm believer in learning being driven by the relationship between teacher and student, I wanted to find a school with excellent teaching staff.

• Relevance of course/school location to your preferred future career: In my case, I was not targeting a career in blue-riband consulting or finance, but a more niche role in African business development. Therefore, I wanted to find somewhere that (a) gave sufficient weight to non-typical MBA markets such as developing economies, and (b) was well-connected with African business and investment.

• Choosing a geography that worked for me: Nothing in life exists in a vacuum. In my case, I got married at around the same time as I applied to MBA programs. Of course then my choice of location became a two-person decision: We needed somewhere that fitted for both my desire to go to school and my wife’s career.

• Commitment: Finally, I needed to figure out the level of commitment (of both time and money) that I was willing to make. This helped me select between 1- vs. 2-year courses, and also come to terms with the necessary financial outlay in return for the education I wanted.

I suppose I weighted each of these criteria somewhat differently, but I would encourage students to figure this out for themselves.

What advice do you have for applicants in actually applying to a school, writing essays, doing admission interviews, and getting recommenders to write letters on your behalf? I only have one stand-out piece of advice on this front: Be honest. I sought advice from a number of friends and associates who had business school experience. I heard a dizzying array of recommendations about key points to hit in my application. In the end, I strongly felt that these did not accurately reflect me, and so I rejected 99% of them and focused on being absolutely candid with the schools I was applying to. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that all applicants follow this path to such an extent. For me, there was no other option I could have taken and still been excited to have been accepted.

What led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA?

By the time that I was offered a place at London Business School I was already clear that there was no other school I could consider accepting (for reasons outlined above). However, I was still torn on the question of whether I could afford (professionally, personally, emotionally, as well as financially) to go to business school at all. Two things finally swayed this decision. First, I spent some time at London Business School open days, etc. and engaged with current and prior students and staff. This helped reassure me of the value I could expect and made me feel both excited and privileged to have been made an offer. Second, London Business School reached out to me with the offer of scholarship support. More importantly than the financial burden relief was the fact that this offer stemmed directly from what I considered to be a very personal application. It therefore felt to me that what I wanted and what London Business School wanted were well aligned, and that I was prepared to invest in this relationship.

What would you ultimately like to achieve before you graduate? This is basically an impossible question to answer. I want to maintain a focus on my overall aim of African business development. At the same time I want to be open to new and exciting ideas. I want to meet smart and interesting people, but I don’t want to lose touch with my prior life. I want to intern as much as possible to experience a wide range of work environments, but not at the expense of my core curriculum. And I want to throw myself whole-hearted in school life while keeping my wife way out in front at the top of my priority list. In general though, my goal is to pull together all of the strings of my experiences to date, and use the skillset I’ll learn to weave them together into a single coherent ‘career’ from here on. Ultimately, I want to use these two years at London Business School to crystallize and consolidate a pragmatic way forward within the somewhat idealistic environment of aspiration that I have nurtured up to now.