Meet IMD’s MBA Class Of 2018

Hassan Abdel Fattah        

IMD Business School

Describe yourself in 15 words or less: Energetic, highly driven professional who loves working with teams and enjoys arriving at meaningful solutions to complex and ambiguous challenges.

Hometown: Alexandria, Egypt & Toronto, Canada

Fun Fact About Yourself: For 8 months, I lived and worked 150 km from the Arctic Circle in a remote town inaccessible by road.

Undergraduate School and Major: McMaster University, Canada – Mechanical Engineering

Employers and Job Titles Since Graduation:

• Project Engineering Manager – Nestlé
• Project Engineer – Nestlé Professional
• Junior Project Engineer – Mondelez International

Additionally:

• Founder – af+consulting (pro bono consulting for NGOs and start-ups with a sustainability agenda)
• Sponsorship Manager – Project Management Institute (PMI)

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: Industrializing a first-to-market product in North America ahead of schedule with phenomenal production metrics. This put the business category in an incredible market leadership and supply chain position.

Looking back on your experience, what one piece of advice would you give to future business school applicants? Spend a lot of time understanding the fit with your shortlisted b-schools. There are tons of excellent, top-ranked MBA programs at the moment and fit needs to play a bigger role in your choice. Some schools focus more on an entrepreneurial spirit, while others cater to a finance-driven cohort. During your research, it’s easy to get distracted by b-school forums’ definition of what makes a b-school the best for you, and you need to dig deep in an introspective process with yourself to arrive at the best b-school option for you.

What was the key factor that led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA and why was it so important to you? It would be IMD’s unrelenting focus on leadership and the diversity of the tools and program-specific modules designed to make the cohort challenge themselves as leaders of the future is simply impressive. At the end of the day an MBA program is about you; it starts with you and ends with a better, more equipped version of yourself. The idea of joining a program that provides you with the classic MBA toolkit to help you pursue a career in industry, private equity or consulting all while emerging as a better, more self-aware individual allowing you to lead and navigate the complexities of future business challenges, was an easy sell to me.

What would success look like to you after your first year of business school? Maximizing my learnings from 89 other intriguing and exceptional classmates who come from literally all over the world. They bring experiences in law, medicine, private equity, consulting, technology and other diverse industries to study groups, classrooms and the many casual, daily conversations we have over lunch and dinner. Getting a better, more complete picture of the complex network of interactions in the business world across different industries and across cultural and geographical intricacies will help calibrate me and prepare me for a powerful impact post-graduation.