Julian Becker

IESE Business School

“Driven, entrepreneurial individual with strategy consulting background and entrepreneurship aspirations.”

Hometown: Koblenz, Germany

Fun Fact About Yourself: Enthusiastic about anything related to Giraffes

Undergraduate School and Major: WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management, Vallendar, Germany

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Oliver Wyman, Management Consultant

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: Beside my job as management consultant, I organized a conference on social entrepreneurship called “SensAbility” connecting 250 social entrepreneurs and students together on a yearly basis. Four months before the conference, two of three main sponsors withdrew their support resulting in a five-digit budget deficit. As head of the team responsible for sponsoring and finance, I intensified sponsoring activities within my team, signed a new main sponsor and organized several fundraiser events. Ultimately, we managed to close the budget gap within two months only and ran a successful conference later that year.

What quality best describes the MBA classmates you’ve met so far and why? Diversity of thought – while many MBA programs gather students that are diverse in terms of origin, IESE manages to get a unique variety of different perspective on a table. During several events, this diversity of thought has already made myself self-reflect and change.

Aside from your classmates, 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? IESE is well-known for its “Summer Entrepreneurship Challenge”, a three-month dedicated program during which a student founds a company between the 1st and the 2nd year. There, I will have the chance to work on a social business idea and already learn how to start a company from setting up its legal structure to designing its products. In the “safe environment” of the MBA, this program is a unique opportunity to fail and try again.

What club or activity are you looking most forward to in business school? Entrepreneurship club

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point in your career? After three years in the consulting profession, I have gathered expertise on how to run projects and work together in teams. With the MBA, I now want to acquire the knowledge and skills necessary to found and sustainably run a company and hope to achieve this goal by programs such as the “Summer Entrepreneurship Challenge” as well as a student body full of smart individuals of which many have already founded companies or worked in entrepreneurial environments.

How did you decide if an MBA was worth the investment? The experiences and network from my MBA will materialize not only over the next 5 years, but over my entire working life (i.e. 40 – 50 years). Given this long timeframe I am pretty convinced that the investment will ultimately pay off.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? Apart from IESE, I considered enrolling at INSEAD and the London Business School. After partaking in several events and the admission process at IESE, I was fully convinced that it is this program that suites my entrepreneurial and personal growth targets best.

How did you determine your fit at various schools?

What factors did you prioritize? Diversity of personalities among applicants, MBA candidates and alumni, entrepreneurship course offering, program length, and MBA rankings

What tools did you use to evaluate schools? School visits, exchange with IESE alumni within current employer, and web research

How did you research culture? Interactions with individuals during school visits.

What was your defining moment and how did it shape who you are? At the age of 16, I moved to Valencia to visit a local Spanish-speaking high school. Despite not speaking the language and having no prior connection to the country, I quickly managed to immerge into this unknown surrounding and become fluent in Spanish within short time. Personally, my exchange to Spain helped me to develop my ability to adapt to new environments and gave me the positive mindset I leverage today to my professional and personal greater challenges.

What do you plan to do after you graduate? After my graduation in 2020, I want to return to Oliver Wyman and put in practice the learnings I will have gathered during my MBA at IESE. There, I will focus on gaining in-depth experience in applications of machine learning within the firm’s Digital, Technology & Analytics practice and quickly develop towards a senior project manager at Oliver Wyman.

Where do you see yourself in five years? In five years, I see myself in the management of my own tech start-up.