Catherine Dimitroff

INSEAD

“I am British-American and have spent my career so far in sustainable investment.”

Hometown: London, England

Fun Fact About Yourself: While I was born in the US and have an American accent, I have never lived there. I spent my first years living with my family in Almaty, Kazakhstan before moving to London.

Undergraduate School and Major: University of Oxford, BA in Classics

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: My most recent permanent position was as an ESG Strategy Associate at AQR, a quantitative investment manager, though I just completed a 6-month pre-MBA internship at Evercore.

INSEAD is one of the most culturally and professionally diverse MBA programs in the world. How do you see these global perspectives enhancing the value of your business education over the next year? INSEAD’s focus on forming truly diverse and international MBA cohorts is one of the key factors that drew me to the program. Each person in my class will bring a unique cultural perspective and professional background. This will broaden my horizons and be invaluable in helping me learn different ways of thinking and solving business problems.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key part of INSEAD’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? Aside from its exceptional reputation, one of the key factors that distinguishes INSEAD’s MBA program is that it condenses what is usually a 2-year program into 1 year. This was highly appealing to me from both an efficiency and cost perspective. INSEAD’s accelerated program will provide me with a globally recognized qualification from one of the world’s leading business schools, while only requiring me to take one year out of full-time work.

What has been your first impression of the INSEAD MBA students and alumni you’ve met so far. Tell us your best INSEAD story so far. I have had the opportunity to meet several of the other students joining the Fontainebleau campus from London over the past few months. Individually, they have all been extremely friendly, and as a whole, I was impressed by the range of professional backgrounds that they are joining the program from, including law, journalism, the military, consultancy, and government. This is a testament to the work that the admissions team does to create diverse cohorts in terms of nationality, professional and educational background, and career interests. I have also been very impressed with how approachable the alumni network is, both at the application stage and in helping me prepare to make the most out of the program.

My best INSEAD story so far is from my interviews. INSEAD’s MBA interviews are conducted by alumni, and one of my interviewers is now a very successful tech entrepreneur. He told me that prior to INSEAD, he did not have entrepreneurial aspirations, but that his time at INSEAD made him realize what he is capable of doing and equipped him with the skills to achieve these goals. This strongly resonated with me as I think about developing my own onward career path, and I am looking forward to having this same transformative experience.

What course, club or activity excites you the most at INSEAD? While there are several clubs and activities I hope to join on campus, I am most excited about being involved in the INSEAD Student Impact Fund (ISIF). This will provide me with the opportunity to collaborate with other students and gain hands-on experience in sourcing, executing, and monitoring investments in ventures focused on a range of social and environmental issues.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: When working in ESG strategy at AQR, I managed to convince 50+ of AQR’s largest portfolio companies to disclose their environmental data to the market for the first time. These companies comprised 1% of the MSCI Emerging Index weight.

In order to do this, I convinced these companies of the value of disclosure to systematic managers like AQR with details on how this data drives our positioning in climate-aware portfolios. Several companies had failed to respond to our outreach in previous years, so I emphasized AQR’s meaningful holding in each company and designed an escalation protocol, outlining the measures that AQR might take if a company continually failed to disclose the requested information.

This enabled us to showcase our ESG impact to our global client base and was a signal of the growing significance of disclosing environmental data.

What do you hope to do after graduation (at this point)? I have a few ideas in mind and am excited to use the year at INSEAD, with the guidance of the career and sector coaches, to decide on the best next step.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? I plan to live and work in Europe after I finish my MBA, and so I was most interested in European business schools. Of the European schools, INSEAD was by far my top choice given the school’s reputation and the structure of the MBA program. The proximity of the Fontainebleau campus to Paris, and the option to spend a semester on the Singapore campus, also didn’t hurt!

What advice would you give to help potential applicants gain admission into INSEAD’s MBA program? Know your answers to the following questions: What does INSEAD offer me, and what do I offer INSEAD?

In the current application form, you are not explicitly asked to answer these questions. However, I think it’s essential to convey in your responses, particularly to questions about your background and career goals, why an MBA from INSEAD will help you more than any other program would, and how you will bring a unique perspective to the class. These questions are likely to also be a key focus of your interviews.

Providing compelling answers to these questions requires you to do some research and reflection. I found it most useful to talk to current students and alumni to understand the program, how it will support my career goals, and where I want to have an impact in my time at INSEAD.

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