Shipra Singh

Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus Universit

Hometown: Agra (The city of Taj Mahal) in India

Fun Fact About Yourself: Love “nomad life.” Have not spent more than 3 years in any city at a stretch (due to my father’s transferable job and now due to my career)

Undergraduate School and Major: Symbiosis International University – Finance

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Manager at KPMG, India

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: Prepared for and attended the meeting with the current Prime minister of India, Mr Narendra Modi, and Global CEOs of fortune 500 meeting in India (under Make in India) in January 2017. I was the youngest member on the table.

What quality best describes the MBA classmates you’ve met so far and why? Absolutely inspiring and challenging. They bring out best in me. I have witnessed so many different perspectives, mostly driven by their cultures. Another quality is the art of time management and prioritisation while juggling between multiple tasks. I learn something from them every day – learning at a roller-coaster ride.

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? Student diversity for multi-culture exposure, research-oriented faculty, dedicated courses on sustainability, 1-year duration of the course and smaller class size.

Why? It is because I believe in investing in relations and smaller class size makes the class a close-knit family, where you could know your batchmates better and establish stronger bonds (for life). I am looking forward to peer-to-peer learnings as much as learnings from the faculty. I know that leveraging close to 40 countries’ cultural values and wisdom to solve different business problems in the class is “the learning opportunity of my lifetime.” Finally, I resonate most with the mission statement of RSM: “A force for positive change.” We, as the next generation leaders, need to bring the positive change to the society to make this world a better place.

What club or activity are you looking most forward to in business school? Net Impact (for sustainability), RSM TEDx, and Marketing clubs.

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point in your career? In my previous job, I was working very closely with international investors across the globe and I stumbled, many times, upon how country’s culture impacted their decision-making process and was sometimes amazed with their approach to their problems and innovative solutions to solve them. This is when I decided to go for a global course, to invest in expanding my mental horizons and learn different perspectives on solving business problems.

How did you decide if an MBA was worth the investment? After spending seven years in the finance and banking world, I wanted to explore different domains and smooth out some of my rough edges, mostly around soft skills. Hence, global MBA was my natural choice. At the same time, I did not want to invest time and money in two-year long courses. Therefore I started focusing on the ones which were one-year long. RSM was one of my top choices.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? The INSEAD, IMD, and Cambridge MBA programs

How did you determine your fit at various schools? The most important factors to me were course duration, average age, class size, diversity, and how alumni responded to my queries (mostly through LinkedIn) during my application process. RSM scored the most on all of them and hey… good news is – it accepted me!

What was your defining moment and how did it shape who you are? During my tenure at Invest India, I saw the direct impact of my work as it brought jobs to other people and contributed to India’s GDP. It was a very satisfying feeling.  It brought me some sense of responsibility and that is when I started thinking about channelling my efforts, through my work, to make this world a better place.

What do you plan to do after you graduate? These days, marketing is moving towards big data and analytics. Since I really like numbers and analyses and am intrigued by the consumer behaviour and their decision-making process, I would like to explore data driven marketing. It would be great to understand how consumer behaviour drives different corporate strategies in different parts of the world.

Where do you see yourself in five years? Inspiring, helping, and motivating my colleagues and friends to bring out best in them.