How London Business School Gave Me The Motivation & Tools To Reimagine My Career

Arriving at London Business School to join its inaugural One-year MBA cohort, I was considering some important questions about my future career path. After four years at the World Bank’s Private Sector Window, I had a strong track record in development finance, but a growing feeling that I might have outgrown my largely behind-the-scenes role. Now was the time to see for myself if an MBA would simply confirm the path I was already on or genuinely expand my horizons. I knew I was ready for something more dynamic, something that sets me up to be a future leader. As I walked into orientation with my suit, tie, and nametag, I could finally see where my efforts could take me.

Leading up to the MBA, I absolutely felt that my work had been consequential. I had structured high-impact blended finance projects across emerging markets, mobilised over $9 billion in capital, and earned the institution’s Finance Partners Award two years in a row. However, it was also largely behind the scenes. While I enjoyed getting key stakeholders aligned, drafting board documents, and supporting investment teams, I wanted to be closer to the deal. Closer to implementation. More entrepreneurial. I wanted to stop enabling other people’s leadership and start exercising my own. The MBA felt like the right inflection point — a structured way to transition from a support role in a large multilateral institution toward something more dynamic, more strategic, and more directly impactful.

What I didn’t fully anticipate was how much LBS would challenge that framing and accelerate that transformation — not just through its curriculum, but also through the inspiring, diverse ecosystem where I found myself.

A ROOFTOP IN SINGAPORE, AND A CONVERSATION THAT CHANGED THINGS

In February, I participated in the LBS Singapore Global Experience—an immersive weeklong course exploring sustainability in one of the world’s most dynamic economies. The sessions were exceptional. In particular, visits to the Singapore Economic Development Board, agri-business Olam Agri, and Keppel’s desalination infrastructure gave our cohort a ground-level view of how governments, industries, and capital markets are navigating the sustainability transition in practice.

But the moment that stayed with me most didn’t happen in a boardroom or a factory. It happened on a rooftop.

One evening, our group had the opportunity to connect with LBS alumni now in senior leadership positions at banks, investment firms, and development institutions across Asia and beyond. It was the kind of gathering that, earlier in my career, I would have approached with a notebook and a lot of listening.

This time was different. I found myself in a deep conversation with a managing director of sustainable finance at a major international bank — not deferring to his expertise, but genuinely exchanging ideas. I was contributing perspectives on impact measurement, sustainability, gender-linked bonds, and where blended finance mechanisms were working (and where they weren’t). He was engaged — not politely, but substantively. By the end of the evening, he told me that if I were ever exploring opportunities in his region, his team would definitely want to speak with me.

It was a small moment, but it was clarifying. The LBS ecosystem — its global alumni network, international faculty, and student cohort who had already built careers across every continent — had quietly repositioned me. I wasn’t a junior practitioner grateful for access to senior practitioners. I was a peer, with something real to offer.

EXPANDING THE MAP

That shift in how I see myself has translated directly into how I think about what comes next.

Before LBS, I knew what I was good at doing: mobilising capital, navigating complex stakeholder environments, and structuring projects that needed to balance development impact with financial viability. What I hadn’t fully appreciated was how transferable those skills are — and how strong the demand for them is outside the multilateral system.

LBS has pushed me to think beyond the direct, tier-one applications of my background. The conversations here — with classmates who have built companies, run investment strategies, and advised governments — have shown me something critical. The problems I care most about, such as mobilising capital toward locally-led impact in emerging markets, can be addressed from many different vantage points. These may include venture capital backing local founders; strategy roles helping global companies expand responsibly into high-growth markets; investment platforms that sit at the intersection of European capital and African or Latin American growth; and foundations scaling what works.

The through-line in all of these is not a sector or an institution. It’s a conviction that impact is most durable when it’s locally led, and that the most important work in this space is still to be done.

BUILDING SOMETHING THAT LASTS

One of the things LBS has consistently encouraged is the idea that your MBA is not just about what you learn — it’s about what you build. The school’s collaborative club ecosystem creates real infrastructure for students to lead initiatives that outlast their own enrolment.

For me, that has taken the form of founding a Global Emerging Markets discussion forum — the first step toward what I hope will eventually become a fully-fledged student club. The vision is deliberately multidisciplinary: not just investment and finance, but health, education, human development, and skills training. Not just one geography, but a structure — with regional and thematic vice presidents — that reflects the actual breadth and complexity of the emerging markets landscape.

The inspiration came partly from my time at Cornell’s Emerging Markets Institute during my Master’s in Management, along with learning from the organizational structure of the World Bank. However, LBS has given me something different, something novel above and beyond. It is the motivational toolkit to enable engagement with a genuinely collaborative global student body where people truly want to make impact back home. That shared motivation is the easiest possible foundation for building something real and lasting.

I won’t be at LBS when this club reaches its full potential. That’s the point. I hope to advise the next cohort of students who carry it forward, and the cohort after that. The goal is to make it a genuine thought leader in the space — something distinctive that LBS can offer among the world’s top business schools. As an LBS alumnus, I’ll still be able to play a vital role in this.

WHAT BUSINESS SCHOOL ACTUALLY DOES

If I’m honest, the most valuable thing LBS has given me is not a framework, a network, or even a credential. It’s confidence — the specific confidence that comes from being tested alongside extraordinary people, and discovering that you belong in that room.

For prospective students who already have deep professional experience and are wondering whether an MBA will genuinely move the needle: my answer, one year in, is yes — but perhaps not in the ways you expect. It will not necessarily teach you things you don’t already know. What it will do, if you let it, is show you how much further your existing expertise can reach.

I arrived at LBS worried I would default to the familiar. I’m leaving with a much larger map — and the conviction that the most interesting part of the journey is still ahead.

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Juan David Alduncin is an MBA1Y 2026 candidate at London Business School, a former Portfolio Analyst at the World Bank’s IDA Private Sector Window, and the founder of LBS’s Global Emerging Markets discussion forum.

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