Ilya Blay 

University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business

“Dreamer, world-traveler, life-long learner and mentor.”

Hometown: New York, NY and Las Vegas, NV

Fun Fact About Yourself: I had a black belt in Goju Ryu karate and taught karate to both children and adults when I was 13 years old.

Undergraduate School and Major: Cornell University

• S. – Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering
• Eng. – Mechanical Engineering

Most Recent Employer and Job Title:

• Ernst & Young
• Senior Consultant, Advanced Analytics

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: I am most proud of having mentored the people who followed me and helped them become successful in their own right.

What quality best describes the MBA classmates you’ve met so far and why? My classmates have done a great job of balancing their ambition and desire to succeed with a willingness to help and collaborate. In a short time, we have developed a community where everyone works hard but supports each other too.

Mendoza is known as a purpose-driven MBA program that asks students to “Ask More of Business.” What is your mission and how will Mendoza help you realize it? My mission is to become a leader that others want to follow by guiding them along their paths and supporting their growth. At Mendoza, I will gain the business knowledge and the network to do that well.

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? The key factor for me in choosing Mendoza was the IDEA center; a startup accelerator within the University. I am interested in entrepreneurship and I was excited to see that Notre Dame was putting resources behind student entrepreneurs.

What club or activity are you looking most forward to in business school? I have joined the IDEA Center as a venture coach. I will be working with student entrepreneurs on various projects and coaching them as they develop their ideas and prepare to pitch them for funding. I am looking forward to this opportunity as a way to learn more about entrepreneurship, help students bring great ideas to life, and immerse myself in these projects.

What was the most challenging question you were asked during the admissions process? I found this essay question challenging and thought-provoking:

“As the world economy continues to grow and change, how do you see business acting as a positive force in the world?”

I reflected on the role that business should play and landed on the idea that the purpose of a business or a business person is to make other people’s lives better.

When I think about purpose, I am always reminded of a quote by Jack Sparrow from the movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl:

“It’s not just a keel and hull and a deck and sails. That’s what a ship needs. But what a ship is… what the Black Pearl really is… is freedom.”

In the same way that a ship needs a keel and a hull and a deck and sails, a business needs facilities and supplies and inventory and profits. In the same way, the purpose of a ship is freedom, the purpose of a business is to make the lives of its customers and its employees better.

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point in your career? I started out as an engineer but quickly pivoted to pursue a career in business. With a breadth of experiences ranging from operations to analytics consulting, I believe I am well-positioned to pursue a variety of paths, but I felt that there were gaps in my foundational business knowledge. In addition, I believe that an MBA will help me to put my experiences into perspective and to develop a clearer idea of which path I will follow.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? Stanford, Berkeley, NYU, and Cornell

How did you determine your fit at various schools? More than anything else, I was looking for courses and programs teaching and supporting entrepreneurship.

What was your defining moment and how did it shape who you are? When I started my job as an Assistant Manager of Global Operations, my manager made clear on the first day that my goal for the next year was to take his job. Everyone else that I had met in my career up to that point had been doing all they could to hold on to the responsibilities they had accumulated. This was different and it informed the kind of leader I would become – focused on the growth of the people that follow me and drawing my success from theirs.

Where do you see yourself in ten years? In 10 years, I hope to lead a group of talented people, working on growing a business that we are all passionate about and that can make a positive impact.