MBA Voices: Typical May Be Overrated – A Non-Traditional Path To INSEAD

This is not the typical story of how someone gets to INSEAD. Then again, typical may be overrated.

In Sri Lanka, a “white van” showing up outside your home in the middle of the night is synonymous with an unexplained disappearance – or even death. On June 1, 2009, at the dead of night, one such van visited my home. Looking through the window, I saw several armed men in black demanding my father come with them. Government-sponsored abductions left no room for negotiation. In what may have been his last words to me, my father said: “Take care of your mother, and do well in your studies.”

He dreamed of completing an MBA somewhere like INSEAD, but never got the chance. He survived… but our family lost everything. What kept us alive was not money. It was the relationships my father had built through years of treating people in business with integrity and generosity. When everything collapsed, those people took genuine personal risks to support us. The first lesson I ever learned about business is that how you treat people is not separate from who you are.

And one day it may be the only thing standing between your family and disaster.

THE VALUE OF A NETWORK

When I came to the United Kingdom at 18, I often found myself without a place to sleep. I would rely on classmates to sign me into their halls so I could sleep in a bathtub. One winter night, the bathtub tap leaked. Drenched and freezing, I understood with complete clarity that no one was coming to save me. I had to save myself.

Through the network I’d built in London, an older friend staked her own reputation in referring me to my first job. That opened the door to four more evening jobs alongside full-time law school. When shift work meant I couldn’t always make lectures, a classmate quietly recorded them on his phone. At the time, I was absorbing a lesson that I did not yet know I was learning: your network is not a transaction. It is a way of being. Treat it with respect, and one day it will save someone – or save you.

At law school, I read about Tidjane Thiam, a Credit Suisse CEO and African leader. I looked up where he had studied, and the answer was INSEAD. Later, working at Amec, I learned our CEO, Samir Brikho, was an INSEAD alumnus. The more I looked, the more the school appeared at the centre of the careers I most admired. I wanted to go badly, but told myself it was unrealistic.

MY BIGGEST OBSTACLE: MYSELF

A decade passed. Through working in corporate finance at Amec, Sky, BT, and Shaw Trust, I qualified as an FCMA and built a career that made me proud. Eventually, at the urging of a mentor and my future wife, I started to examine all the reasons why I kept saying no to myself.  I finally started saying out loud all the reasons I had been telling myself no: Too old at 33, wrong employers, no money.

They turned out to be all wrong assumptions.

When I wrote the application, I stopped writing the version of myself I thought INSEAD wanted. I led with the bathtub, the unknown employer, the financial stretch, and all the things I had been told would disqualify me. They turned out to be the backbone of my application. I was admitted with three scholarships to the school I had been aspiring to attend for ten years. The lesson I wish I had learned earlier: the people telling me I was not the right profile were not the admissions committee. They were the voices in my own head.

Arriving at Fontainebleau felt like the end of one journey and the beginning of another. For the first time in my education, I sat in a classroom with no second job to rush to, no family crisis to manage, and no survival calculation running in my mind. Just learning. The differences I had been so worried about turned out to be the strengths I had been undervaluing. INSEAD gave me something I had not expected: a mirror. The school invests heavily in network-building, leadership under uncertainty, and cross-cultural intelligence. When I reflected on my own story, I realised I had been practising all of these skills for 15 years out of necessity.

What changed at INSEAD was not the skills I had. It was how I understood and valued them. That realisation drove me to give back wherever I could, connecting new arrivals, offering visa guidance, and serving as VP of the Student Council. I knew, better than most, what it means to need someone to reach out.

A TRIAL BY FIRE

Nowhere was this tested more directly than during my Abu Dhabi campus exchange. When a regional conflict escalated, 23 colleagues found themselves unable to leave. I made it my responsibility to get them home. What followed was the most concentrated leadership challenge I had faced since my own survival. I built a real-time picture of who was where, mapping locations, nationalities, visa constraints, financial situations, and psychological states simultaneously. I sequenced the exits by urgency, negotiated directly with university administrators on academic continuity and deadline extensions, and managed the flow of information carefully so that people felt informed without being destabilised further. I checked in with every person individually and regularly. No one was left to wonder if anyone was thinking about them.

What I want to be honest about is this: no framework I learned at INSEAD helped me in that room. What helped was something older and harder-won. I knew what it felt like to be alone, displaced, and in a place of absolute fear. I had lived in that place myself. That experience meant I could read what people needed before they asked: not just logistics, but dignity, reassurance, and the knowledge that someone was accountable for bringing them home.

INSEAD had sharpened skills I could not have named before I arrived. I had spent months working across cultures, learning to communicate differently to different audiences, and understanding how to manage uncertainty without transmitting it. These principles had run quietly in the background and made me more effective than I would otherwise have been. The instinct came from my life. INSEAD refined the execution. Crisis leadership, I came to understand, is not a curriculum. It is a biography, informed by every classroom you have ever sat in, including the ones that did not look like classrooms. INSEAD gave me the vocabulary to understand what I already knew. The crisis gave me the proof.

Many colleagues asked why I took their safety so personally. I told them that I had been the person needing help, and I had not forgotten what that felt like. If you are bringing a life that the classroom does not yet recognise, bring it anyway. The room is incomplete without it.

YOUR REAL VALUE IS NOT WHAT YOU MIGHT EXPECT

As I enter the final weeks of my INSEAD journey, I think about the version of me that almost did not apply. No external funding. No target-firm pedigree. 33 years old. Average GMAT. Preconceived barriers that almost prevented me taking that crucial next step in my life. If you are hesitating right now, remember that you may be the only representative from your country, your industry, or your background. That is not a weakness in your application. It is the point of it. Many who deserve a place at a school like this never get the chance. If you have the opportunity, take it all the way to the end of the line.

For those whose path to INSEAD has been more conventional, look around your cohort with curiosity. Some classmates have travelled distances you cannot imagine to be in that room. Socioeconomic background is the divide we discuss least and it shapes lives more than almost anything else. The relationships you build across it will be among the most valuable of your career.

Do not hesitate.

 

Bio

Josh Selva is an INSEAD MBA (26J), FCMA, and UCL law graduate. He is the recipient of three INSEAD scholarships including the Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship. A commercial finance and strategy professional, he has worked across Amec Foster Wheeler, Sky, British Telecom, and Shaw Trust, spanning infrastructure, government, and TMT. To know more, check his LinkedIn profile here.

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