Turning Down HBS With No Regrets

Symonds: What advice do you have for someone going to business school to get the most out of the experience?

Heslop: Don’t sleep very much. For me, I was one of the older students, I hadn’t been in academia for 10-15 years, and being rigorous as it is, it was pretty tough when I started: Five to six subjects a week, taking into account you’re trying to learn something new, make new friends, build networks, rugby club… I found the first six months very, very, very busy. Then once you’ve gotten through that, and start to master the academics side, you realize that you don’t have to read every page, or you can spend two hours instead of five on prep for a case or class. Then you figure out your social network and start accepting help from exceptionally gifted classmates and it all becomes a little bit easier to manage.

My best advice is, you’re spending an immense amount of money, you will get out what you put in. If you put in more, you get out more, and if you don’t put in much, then you’re probably wasting your money. It’s the whole academic experience, the peer network, I learned as much from the student body and my class mates especially in case studies and my study group as I did from my professors. It one of the things I enjoyed most about London. The absolute quality of the student body. Choose a school where the culture and people there make you feel comfortable, because you don’t get to be an MBA alumni again somewhere else. “Life is not a dress rehearsal” – you definitely won’t do an MBA twice.

Symonds: What was it like to be an older candidate?

Heslop: I was 33 when I went to business school. There were a couple of people like me in my class, but not very many who could relate to the experience I had before I started the MBA program, my last field job before going to B-school was managing a project of 450 people and $11.5 million in the middle of Kosovo. Most people didn’t have that kind of experience in my class, they were on average five years younger and had maybe been managing teams of up to 10 people.

Symonds: Why did you decide to pursue an MBA?

Heslop: Back when I was in undergrad, my best friend and I both talked about MBAs, talked about the GMAT and different target schools. I was working with The HALO Trust, a British charity. I’d worked in Mozambique, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia. They sent me to New York to set up a fundraising and liaison office to the UN and US Government. At that stage, I’d been a country manager and had just about every management position in the organization, and HALO was offering to send me back to Afghanistan – but no one wants to go backwards. At the time the guy who ended up as my best man was doing an MBA in Chicago, at top of his class, he was obviously loving the MBA and doing well, which gave me more thought, he gave me great advice on how to go about the application process and make myself stand out.

Then I sat one day looking out the window of my apartment, and across the street was Fordham University with a big sign advertising its MBA program. I basically faxed them my CV on a spur of a moment whim, and about 20 minutes later they called me back and said they were interested in meeting with me. I said I was right across the street, so shortly after I was in an interview. At end of the interview, they offered me place and a potential scholarship. And I thought: If I can get a firm offer within about four hours, perhaps I should aim a little higher.

Then I started GMAT prep – a bit of a nightmare process – I’m dyslexic, so it was hard and I had not done anything academic for years. Just to round it off, 9/11 happened in New York right in the middle of my application process, HALO had thousands of employees working in Afghanistan, and I spent about every day contacting the American government and military to try and make sure HALO’s humanitarian demining teams were not being mistakenly targeted. So I was doing that in the middle of preparing GMAT and the whole business school application process.

I rang each of the schools I was planning on applying to – all top 10 schools – and told them what was going on. The school that was the most flexible by far was LBS. They said I could submit my application conditionally, though they wouldn’t give me a confirmed offer until I’d submitted my GMAT score. With all the others, they said if you don’t have GMAT score, don’t bother putting in your application. For LBS, its understanding about the professional challenges I was dealing with at the time said a lot about its culture, and I thought: this is a school I’m interested in.

Symonds: Why pursue the MBA?

Heslop: The reason I thought about doing it – I’d reached the highest level I was going to get to in the organization I was working for. I wanted a break, to reset and reflect. One option I was considering was the UN, and I thought the MBA would give me the skills I needed and probably open doors. A lot was about giving myself a fresh start and not wasting the time.

And if I was to go to UN to get professional grade post – as I have now – you have to have a Masters degree. So doing it at that time made sense. Most people in the UN have a Masters in International Affairs or Aid and Development but I thought a business degree would perhaps open more doors, make me more attractive and if the UN didn’t work out give me other opportunities outside of the UN and the Aid world. The success at Fordham gave me confidence to try for higher ranked B-schools.

Symonds: Which part of the MBA experience had the most impact on you at the time?

Heslop: It may sound a bit strange, but it was there that I realized I was dyslexic – I only found that out in business school. Before that I’d always been fairly bright but my academic results were not great. I was told I was lazy and/or stupid at school and undergrad. At LBS, everyone is incredibly bright, very dynamic, and for about 60% of students, English wasn’t even their first language. Yet I felt in my class I was holding my own, firmly in the middle – and possibly top side of the middle. And yet my results on the exams were putting me in the bottom quarter. Then someone said, ‘you might have dyslexia,’ so then I got tested and was given strategies to deal with it. It changed my performance. It was an interesting revelation at 33 years old.

Symonds: Looking back, what has been the most valuable thing you’ve gained from business school?

Heslop: Probably self-confidence. Maybe it’s strange coming from someone who’s cleared thousands of bombs and mines. Often, I’m required to give briefings to member states and committees in the UN. This can range from advising the Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council through to different General Assembly working groups and meetings. The UN is an entity, not a person, they have delegates right up at the ambassador level, who sit on these committees like weapons and arms control, treaty compliance, etc. I have to brief them on different aspects of UNMAS programs, or different projects several times a year. I brief the military advisors from member states at least twice a year on issues related to mine clearance, dealing with IED’s being used against peace keepers and how to try and reduce peace keeper casualties. I have stood there with Special Representatives of the Secretary General and Special envoys in a closed session of security council and provided background on projects ranging across Africa and the Middle East. Answering their technical questions, and trying to provide advice senior government officials for the countries most impacted by our work. Yes, it is pretty cool to realize where you are and who is asking the questions.

Annually I am on standby to defend the UNMAS budgets in peace keeping and our strategies for project delivery. A budget committee can literally come back with a question or a statement of: “We want to cut this budget by $20 million – you need defend it now!” You can have less than an hour to come back with the right response or budget is cut and thousands of lives affected.

I’m briefing the Sanctions Committee of the UN Security Council next week. I’m going to talk strategy, results, make the pitch for funding and their support. I have the confidence to pull all that together and know I can do it right. I can explain, defend. I can talk strategy, I can talk numbers. My MBA is from a top five business school, I am a LBS alumni. I was pretty arrogant before a went to LBS, but I think the MBA from a top school allows me to frame an argument in a much more structured way and present it coherently, and in my mind, I have the credibility based on experience and academics to hold my own. In front of any one, or committee.

Symonds: Is it true that you guided Princess Diana on her famous trip to the minefields?

Heslop: That was me. When I as working in Angola, I got a call from my mom saying, “Princess Diana is coming to visit you”. A few minutes later I got the call at HALO HQ confirming she was coming, and we set up the visit. The night before her visit, I thought, we have to get the HALO logo out there and the obvious place was on the body armor she was going to be wearing. It was pretty obvious the images of her trip were going to be on the front pages of every newspaper in the world. At that time, it was not an industry standard for organizations to put their logo on body armor – it is now! So, first I took a sticker and stuck it on, but it kept peeling off. So then I took a blue marker, traced the logo onto my pillow case (the only white material we had) and – as I cannot sew – asked our maid to sew it onto the body armor that Princess Diana’s would wear the next day. We had the HALO logos front and center when we took her through the mine field. We achieved a media coup with the HALO logo/brand on the most famous woman in the world. That image has been used hundreds, probably thousands of times since.

The moment I remember the most is, as she was about to leave the minefield, I gave her a mine that we had defused and removed the explosives from. And as I handed it over, I joked, “For God’s sake don’t put it in Charles’s bed when you get home!” She just threw her head back and laughed. Of course the media captured it (without knowing why she was laughing) but I think it’s one of the most relaxed shots I’ve ever seen of her. It always makes me smile when I see it.

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I will be joined by the MBA Admissions Director at London Business School, David Simpson in Boston next week, as well as deans and directors from 30 of the world’s other top 40 business schools, to discuss why business school might be the right step for your personal and professional development, and how to navigate the minefield of the admissions process.