Meet The HEC Paris MBA Class Of 2026

P&Q: What types of programming – through classroom instruction, extracurriculars, and treks – does your school offer to expose students to country-specific and global business practices? What have students told you were the most educational and fun aspects of these activities?

Harris: “The HEC Paris MBA program makes the most of its proximity to London and presence in the capital via our HEC UK House, which provides dedicated meeting and seminar space in the center of London available to alumni and faculty. Over the past year, we delivered a three-day elective course at the HEC UK House on the topic of Diversity, Leadership and High Performance. In doing so, we helped participants to understand how DEI is a leadership imperative for high performance and to recognize the value of thinking globally and acting locally. Participants enjoyed the ‘powerful and insightful’ cases discussed and the added value of the subject experts who spoke during the course. They particularly enjoyed the opportunity to better understand diverging perspectives via the use of virtual reality to enhance the learning experience.

The school has strong links to the luxury industry and offers an elective presenting the global economy of the industry, its features and trends, allowing participants to identify and articulate successful luxury business strategies.

Within France, HEC Paris benefits from a rich ecosystem of corporate partners and organizes visits to partner companies to see firsthand the cases studied in class. Our MBA participants are also able to get out of the classroom to appreciate themes from a particularly French viewpoint, for example a visit to the Château de Versailles for a tour on the theme of Archetypes of French Leadership.

The HEC Talents career center actively partners with MBA Clubs in order to enrich their events and programming. The MBA Clubs provide a space for participants with similar interests to share expertise, learn new skills, and network together.  We facilitate over 60 corporate connections to student clubs every year. The MBA Trek Week in April is a great example of collaboration with career clubs with the organization of sector-specific treks whose recent destinations included Amsterdam, Berlin, Dubai, London, Milan, Paris, Stuttgart. During career treks, MBA participants not only meet with top employers but also connect with the HEC Alumni chapters. Like any other career development program, we constantly assess the quality of each trek and the ultimate value created for our participants (through Net Promoter Scores).”

P&Q: What are the most exciting new courses that your school is offering to MBAs this school year? What makes them so unique and valuable?

Harris: “We offer two new core leadership courses during the Fundamental Phase of our program, Leadership Communication and Leadership: Influence & Decision Making. These courses help students to develop their capacity to give and receive developmental feedback, engage in difficult conversations, manage conflict, and be aware of where their own developmental areas lie.

We have a new elective proposed by a new member of the faculty, entitled From Algorithms to Ethics: Managing AI Responsibly. The course will provide participants with the strategy and management frameworks needed to manage data resources, the programmers using data to develop AI, and the deployment of AI in their organizations. It will also examine the ethical implications of AI development and use, ranging from data privacy to algorithmic fairness as well as the potential competitive and ethical risks of using data in business activities, including the importance of managing government regulators and data suppliers.

P&Q: Who are two new professors who’ve joined your faculty in the past year? What do they teach and how will they be difference-makers in your MBA program?

Harris:

“Michael Impink: Michael is an Assistant professor in our Strategy and Business Policy department and is affiliated to our research center Hi!Paris, the Center on Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for Science, Business and Society created by Institut Polytechnique de Paris (IP Paris) and HEC Paris. Michael’s research and teaching centers on the role of AI in business and particularly in start-ups. His teaching focus within the MBA how to leverage the power of AI while keeping in mind the ethical dilemmas it poses for businesses.

Peter Fischer: Peter has joined our Education Track Faculty within the Marketing department and is focused on delivering the very best classroom experience for our MBA participants. For almost 15 years, Peter has been training top managers on various topics such as international business, consumer behavior, content marketing and storytelling, data analytics, digital marketing, managerial decision-making, and psychology of technology. At the same time Peter conducts research at the intersection of strategy, managerial decision-making, international business, (big) data, AI, psychology, and technology. Peter teaches a content marketing elective and is coordinator for the AI stream of our ‘Creative Destruction Lab’ programme.”

P&Q: What types of support does your career center and alumni provide to MBA students? How have these services and relationships made your graduates more competitive in the marketplace?

Harris: “In the HEC Paris MBA, participants have a structured career curriculum provided by HEC Talents, our career center. This includes an endless rotation of workshops, coaching sessions, and corporate events. Students are also assigned a career coach based on their career goals.  With introductory workshops branded First Steps in, in Consulting, Finance, Tech, Marketing, Luxury, Healthcare, and Sustainability, participants can assess which sector(s) or function they want to explore during their MBA journey. These workshops not only offer the basics like tips for tailoring CVs and interview preparation, but also cover market trends and best practices for students to connect and network with sector-specific firms. Alumni guest speakers also attend these workshops to share their personal experiences in the field.

Given the diversity of backgrounds and aspirations, HEC Talents, the career center, provides the most customized approach with a minimum of four 1-to-1 coaching sessions at critical points of the HEC MBA journey.

Our customized career development journey offers the following compass to each participant: to understand and communicate well on the transferable skills, to show passion and motivation for this move, to connect with alumni who did the same, to work closely with their dedicated coach, to attend different soft skills and industry focused workshops, to seek feedback, to build a strong network, to stay updated on industry trends and advancements to remain competitive, regularly assess your progress towards your career goals and adjust as needed.

We capitalize on the strong HEC Alumni network (80,000+ members) to source curated job postings from Alumni that are easily accessible to our MBA participants on our job post platform. HEC MBA Alumni frequently attend our MBA Connections events, a series of MBA-specific recruiting events, which include MBA career fairs and stand-alone presentations.

We make sure that HEC participants have adapted CVs and cover letters. We help to connect our students with Alumni at the companies and within the industries they are interested in working in. We also work closely with them to build a compelling and engaging pitch based on their unique professional goals. In parallel, we make sure they are fully prepared for all types of job interviews (e.g.  case cracking workshops and AI/digital tools). We have a comprehensive end-to-end career curriculum that offers candidates with the required resources, tools and skills to ace interviews.

HEC Talents has close connections to the corporate world, organizing 7 all-degree career fairs (all degree programs), 3 MBA-specific career fairs (September, January and May), and MBA stand-alone presentations throughout the year to connect participants directly to recruiters.”

MBA Student	Hometown	Undergraduate Alma Mater	Last Employer
Camila Avellaneda	Bogotá, Colombia	Universidad de los Andes	Olimpia IT
Charles Bauzerand	Marseille, France	Antwerp Maritime Academy	Marseille Fret / Go Capital
Federica Catanzaro	Catanzaro, Italy	Luiss Guido Carli University	Zalando
CEN CHEN	Sichuan, China	HEBEI University of Engineering	Christian Dior Couture
Luis Dominguez Guillot	Mexico City, Mexico	Univeridad Panamericana (Mexico City)	Ernst & Young
Riley Ettinger	Austin, TX	University of Minnesota	Lionsgate Television
Disha Gupta	Delhi, India	Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies	Credit Suisse
Mariko Nakata	Osaka, Japan	Kyoto University	Tokyo International Law Office
Marco Antonio Reyes Ortiz	Mexico City, Mexico	Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México	Citibanamex
Eri Takahashi	Tokyo, Japan	Tokyo University of Foreign Studies	AGC Group
Kota Takahashi	Gumma, Japan	University of Tokyo	Accenture
Mwambela Tembo	Lusaka, Zambia	University of Pretoria	Standard Bank Group

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.