Inside The Stern At NYU Abu Dhabi MBA Experience: A Conversation With Kali Hailegiorgis (Class of 2025)

Q: Can you share your background and what led you to pursue your MBA at Stern at NYUAD?

I’m originally from Ethiopia, but have called Abu Dhabi home for the last year, as I am a member of the Stern at NYUAD One-year Full-time MBA Class of 2025.

I completed my undergraduate studies during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in China. As a result, my studies quickly got disrupted. I missed out on the in-person experience of being a part of a university community, and I had thought that a master’s program would be an opportunity to have that true in-person experience.

While I studied law and public policy in my undergraduate program, I was drawn to the entrepreneurial world of the private sector, which is where I’ve been building my career. While I learned a lot through my professional experience, I knew I lacked a foundation in finance, accounting, strategy, and all of the different business fundamentals that you are required to have a good understanding of for a successful business career.

You can absolutely learn these things on your own, but nothing can really replace the intensive experience of being in the classroom with experts and colleagues who have the same interests as you. I wanted the dedicated time and place to have that experience. I had also reached a career plateau and saw an MBA as a great tool to fuel my career growth.

The Stern at NYUAD One-year Full-time MBA program was exactly that. As a one-year, accelerated program, I was in classes for about six hours per day. That was what I needed as a professional who had been out of the academic space for a while.

It’s been an incredible opportunity to be more intentional with my professional and leadership development. I’ve developed strong capabilities across quantitative disciplines like accounting, corporate finance, and portfolio management, while also deepening my perspective on leadership, strategy, and ethics. I’ve been able to pause and ask myself fundamental questions: what do I want to be known for as a leader? How do I want to work with people? How do I want to inspire others? What are my strengths and weaknesses? It was a very fulfilling experience in which I could reflect on myself as a professional and as an individual.

Q: What were your career goals when you began the Stern at NYUAD MBA, and how have they evolved since?

I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I built my career within the startup space and wanted to go into venture capital. Given Stern’s strong reputation in finance, I knew the program would give me strong brand recognition.

There was also the Finance specialization, which fit well because I wanted to take classes that would give me the quantitative skills to work in the venture capital space. Throughout the MBA, I challenged myself to learn a lot of different things that would be required for my career and got hands-on experience through my Signature Internship Project, working on the investment strategy for an Abu Dhabi government entity.

For my other Stern Signature Project, I worked with a regional stock exchange’s technology and innovation arm. This was an exciting opportunity for my team to work on their tokenization strategy. In a world where blockchain and tokenization are such buzzwords, I wanted to be exposed to that world and understand how it actually worked and what goes into creating a national strategy around tokenization. I wanted to learn about the considerations involved in aligning these types of strategies with broader agendas and how to sell that vision to high-level stakeholders.

This Stern Signature Project was such an incredible learning experience. Being able to take a deep dive into the world of tokenization and financial technology, working with the Chief Development Officer of that group, and understanding how he made the case for tokenization to large banks and the stock exchange while managing relationships with high-level stakeholders was meaningful preparation for my future career.

Overall, it was a fulfilling and exciting experience that I would not have ever gotten to take part in otherwise.

Q: How has the Stern at NYUAD One-year Full-time MBA prepared you for your post-MBA career?

Networking is very important, especially in this region, where trust and relationships are foundational to a successful career. As soon as the program started, the very first thing we did was take the Strategic Communication intensive class for a week. In this class, we practiced our presentation, pitch, and communication skills. There were also many events focused on intercultural communication, which is critical in a country as diverse as the UAE.

All of those things were very helpful. In my current role, I am public-facing and build relationships on behalf of my organization. Understanding how to effectively build relationships within the local context is a very tangible, useful skill that I’ve gained through the Stern at NYUAD MBA.

I also successfully built the financial and business foundation I needed in my career. When interviewing for investment roles, I was asked questions like, how do you assess a business model? How do you look at the strength of a business case? How do you look at the target market for a proposed business? I’m able to effectively answer these questions because I’ve taken classes like Portfolio Management, Corporate Strategy, and Corporate Finance, where I have worked through cases that directly ask you to exercise these skills.

Q: How would you describe your classmates and the learning environment within your cohort at Stern at NYU Abu Dhabi?

The most valuable thing I gained during the program is my cohort. They are a very remarkable group of people.

I had a preconceived notion of who I thought I was going to be taking this journey with when I first accepted my offer of admission. I thought they would be consultants, finance people — classic business professionals. In reality, I took my classes with lawyers, quantum physicists, doctors, entrepreneurs — people from all different backgrounds. As much as I was learning from my professors, I learned so much from my classmates because they brought a wealth of information and perspectives from the very diverse walks of life that they came from. We represented 25 different countries! It was exciting to be engaging with people from all over the world in the classroom.

Beyond that, everybody was genuinely wonderful, welcoming, and so warm. You know, Stern at NYUAD was not playing when they said that EQ plus IQ is one of their core values. I’ve had many moments where my cohort really came through for me — staying up late explaining a subject to me that they knew very well and that I didn’t understand, being patient with me and talking me through it, and always being available if I needed to rant about something over coffee, or inviting me for tea before before bed to calm my nerves. We were always there for each other.

We created such a beautiful, nurturing, and familial environment. I genuinely felt like I was living in a building full of friends, and I didn’t realize how important these people were to me until the last week of the program when we all had to say goodbye to each other because the program was coming to an end. We kind of ignored it beforehand because we knew how painful it would be. Saying bye to everybody made it so evident that these aren’t just my classmates, they’re actually my family.

Q: Which class had the greatest impact on your experience, and why?

We were very fortunate to have artificial intelligence integrated into the curriculum. Every networking conversation I’m part of, every conference, everything that I read is about AI, but I didn’t feel like I completely understood what was happening in this area. One of the classes I got to take was called “Introduction to AI and its Business Applications”, which significantly deepened my knowledge of artificial intelligence in business.

Over six weeks, we learned what artificial intelligence actually is. We answered questions like, what is the intelligence part of artificial intelligence? How do AI tools “think?” How do they retrieve information? Where are they getting their information from? When you’re working with AI agents, how do they operate? How do you use them effectively for businesses? How do you build an AI agent from scratch for a specific business use case? What are its limitations? How do you more effectively leverage the intelligent piece of artificial intelligence so that you’re using it to the best of its capabilities while being careful about the ways that you implement it within an organization?

I feel a lot more confident and comfortable with AI now. The course completely transformed the way that I use AI and interact with it. Now, I feel like I can have better intellectual conversations with people about AI as well, which is critical as you have to be AI competent in the job market. I feel effectively differentiated in the workforce, which is psychologically comforting when going into a very competitive workforce.

Q: How did living and studying in Abu Dhabi — both on campus and in the broader community — shape your experience?

The diversity is something you can’t find anywhere else. You interact with people from all parts of the world, and it’s really exciting and refreshing to be in such a diverse place. People are very welcoming and you never feel like an outsider. It’s very exciting to ask other people where they are from, and learn about so many different cultures, languages, and cuisines.

Saadiyat, where Stern at NYUAD and the NYU Abu Dhabi campus are located, is the cultural center of Abu Dhabi. We have the most beautiful beaches, the Louvre, Team Labs, the Natural History Museum, the Zayed National Museum, and so much more. There’s great nature, and we have access to trees and forests. It feels like a very relaxed, comfortable, diverse, and welcoming place.

It’s also a very competitive market, so there is a certain breed of people that are very attracted to the city — driven, hungry, intellectual people. The kind of conversations that you have when you’re in offices, business meetings, and networking events are exciting. You learn a lot as you’re intellectually challenged by people and the drive that they have.

Q: What advice would you give to prospective students considering the Stern at NYU Abu Dhabi MBA?

Be ready to co-create. This is a new program, which is such an exciting thing. If you’re somebody who likes a little bit of the unknown, a challenge, and you want to be part of building something, then this is the program for you. You’ll have to do a lot of co-creation, which is a great opportunity to start something here — to be the first person to start an initiative, an organization, whatever it may be.

It’s a rare opportunity to contribute to building the legacy of what is an incredible business school in the Middle East.

Stern at NYU Abu Dhabi is a unique place. It’s challenging. We have some of the best professors in the world, so it’s academically rigorous. It is intensive. It’s very go, go, go. You will be challenged. You will be taken out of your comfort zone. You will be in a very dynamic, diverse group. You get rewarded with so much in terms of the quality of education. The dedication and passion that the professors have is incredible and infectious.

The kind of people that are attracted to come here and study are a specific, interesting, exciting, and engaging group of people. No day in the classroom is the same. No day can be boring or disengaging. It’s a fast-paced, exciting environment and before you know it, it’s going to be over.

Q: What have you been doing since graduating, and how has the Stern at NYUAD MBA shaped this next chapter?

I actually got my job offer on the day of graduation, and since then, I’ve been working as a Founders Associate at a clean energy startup based out of San Francisco and Abu Dhabi. It feels great to be back in the workforce applying all the things I learned during my MBA. A lot of my classmates also got jobs in Abu Dhabi so it’s been very nice to continue our traditions of surprising each other for birthdays, trying new cuisines, and spending time together. I even get to run into some of my old classmates in my office building, which is a sweet reminder of days spent on campus in A6!

Being back in the workforce has made my growth during the MBA even more apparent. One of the ways that I’ve grown as an individual throughout the Stern at NYU Abu Dhabi MBA is that I’ve gained a lot more confidence in myself. That’s largely because of the academic resources, like classes and leadership development, that have helped me reflect on my strengths and weaknesses. I understand how to present myself well and what my core strengths are. The many speaking engagements I’ve participated in throughout this year have also helped me train that muscle and have proof points for myself to build out my self-confidence. As someone who has only recently transitioned from an exclusively remote work experience to a hybrid environment, I’m very grateful for the qualitative tools I gained through the program.

Applications are open for the January 2027 MBA cohort. Interested candidates can learn more here.

Amy Kenowitz is Director of Admissions and Marketing for the Stern School of Business at NYU Abu Dhabi, where she oversees marketing, admissions, recruitment, and financial aid for the One-year Full-time MBA and Executive MBA programs. Prior to joining Stern at NYUAD, she held admissions and marketing leadership roles across several NYU graduate programs, including NYU Stern’s Global Degree and Online Programs and at NYU Wagner. Amy is currently a PhD candidate in International Education at NYU Steinhardt.

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