MBA Voices: The Cambridge Ecosystem: An MBA Experience Beyond The Classroom

Six weeks ago, I arrived at Cambridge Judge Business School as an entrepreneur, leaving behind a fast-growing venture to come and learn about business.

I was equal parts nervous and excited. At 27, I was starting a new chapter felt almost surreal—like the opening scene of a sitcom where the protagonist has no idea what is coming next. I arrived with a fairly simple plan: study business, establish my practice in the UK, and eventually take it global.

But I was also deliberately leaving room for the unexpected.

Little did I know what this university, with more than eight centuries of history, had in store for me.

I knew Cambridge had one of the world’s most remarkable educational ecosystems. What I hadn’t fully appreciated was the depth of the ecosystem I was becoming part of: a centuries-old university, comprising 31 Colleges and a community of students, researchers, and academics from around the world. Its streets have been walked by some of history’s greatest thinkers—from Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin to Alan Turing and Stephen Hawking—and, for me personally, by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister, whose story had always fascinated me.

A CULTURE OF CURIOSITY

When I first arrived, I was mesmerised by the architecture: the centuries-old buildings, the grandeur of King’s College Chapel, the courtyards of Trinity, the antique clocks, and (perhaps most charmingly) the narrow streets that weave between the Colleges.

But after the initial awe began to settle, something else stood out to me.

It wasn’t the buildings.

It was the culture.

A culture that seemed to have been consciously preserved alongside the architecture: a culture of curiosity.

Almost everyone I met seemed curious. Curious about what I was working on. Curious about where I came from. Curious about ideas that had little to do with their own discipline. Curious enough to ask questions without necessarily needing to have the answers.

And that, unexpectedly, has become one of the most valuable parts of my Cambridge experience so far.

What follows are a few small stories from my first weeks here—conversations with people from the University of Cambridge and, perhaps more importantly, many from beyond it. Each encounter opened a different window into Cambridge. Together, they began to change not just what I was learning, but why I had come here in the first place.

I. THE JUDGE

The first, and perhaps most important, part of my Cambridge journey was business school. It was, after all, the very reason I had travelled all the way from Mumbai to the United Kingdom.

As I stepped into the colourful building of Cambridge Judge Business School, once a hospital, I was greeted at the entrance by the Head of Admissions, Emily Brierley, and escorted to the common café area on the second floor.

What I saw next was nothing short of a scene from a movie.

It was a room, filled with 225 students from 45 countries, each accomplished in their own field, brought together by a remarkably thoughtful admissions process to pursue an MBA. What followed was a whirlwind of introductions, small talk, unexpected conversations, and an almost overwhelming amount of information to process.

Yet, amid the introductions, certain stories stood out.

One of my batchmates had won an Olympic medal; another had been featured in Forbes; a third was working to tackle the food crisis in Africa; and yet another had played a pivotal role in peace negotiations aimed at averting war.

I felt smaller than I ever had before.

The world suddenly seemed so much bigger than I had imagined.

I met at least ten other founders that day alone. An American entrepreneur tackling an agricultural challenge. A Chinese entrepreneur running an equestrian business in Paris. A Thai industrialist who had led a publicly-listed company. An Australian entrepreneur looking to establish a business in the United Kingdom.

Each conversation opened a window into a world I knew little about. Each person had a different story, a different ambition, and a different way of looking at the world.

And there I was, standing among them, beginning to imagine what the next year might look like as I navigated this intimidating new ecosystem.

But Cambridge Judge was only the beginning.

II. CAMBRIDGE TECH WEEK

One of the first stops during our MBA induction week was Cambridge Tech Week, organised as part of our introduction to the wider Cambridge ecosystem.

If my first few weeks at Judge had shown me the power of bringing 225 people together in one room, Cambridge Tech Week showed me what happens when you expand that room to an entire city.

For five days, Cambridge became a meeting point for founders, researchers, investors, policymakers, and technology leaders from around the world. The conversations ranged from artificial intelligence and quantum computing to healthcare, climate technology, and advanced engineering. More than 1,700 people from 52 countries came together—not simply to talk about technology, but to explore how ideas could be commercialised, funded, and scaled.

For me, one of the most memorable encounters was a brief conversation with the founder of a Cambridge-based medtech startup developing a wearable neurostimulation device for stroke and brain-injury rehabilitation. The technology detects a patient’s intended muscle movement and provides targeted stimulation to help the affected limb move, while also enabling physiotherapists to monitor rehabilitation remotely.

The company was still in its early stages, preparing to move into clinical testing, with regulatory approvals for its eventual go-to-market still underway, and its commercial strategy continuing to take shape.

Suddenly, my founder mindset kicked in.

I found myself thinking through the questions I had spent years grappling with for my own business, but in a completely different context: a new industry, a new geography, a new product, and an entirely different set of investors.

How would they raise the next round of capital? When should they start planning their go-to-market strategy? What would the right price point be? Who would their first customers be? What would the path from prototype to a scalable business actually look like?

The questions kept coming.

What struck me was how naturally the conversation moved from technology and clinical applications to fundraising, pricing, customers, and commercialisation.

The founder came from a biotechnology background, yet seemed just as comfortable discussing finance and business strategy as any finance professional I had encountered.

And I loved it.

This was the kind of conversation I had come to Cambridge for—except I hadn’t quite realised it at the time.

It was just one of many such conversations I would have over the weeks that followed. In classrooms, College halls, cafés, societies, and events, I found myself learning about industries I had never worked in, debating markets I had never studied and questioning assumptions I had previously taken for granted.

At times, the conversations were about technology. On other occasions, they covered about economics. Often, they addressed finance. And every so often, they were simply about why we believed the things we believed.

That was Cambridge.

Every room I walked into seemed to offer a new idea, a new perspective, or a new question.

And slowly, I began to realise that the most valuable part of the education wasn’t always the answer.

It was learning how to question the question itself.

The medtech founder was just one of many examples. Around me were entrepreneurs working on agriculture, healthcare, artificial intelligence, and climate technology; researchers turning scientific breakthroughs into commercial applications; and investors looking for the next generation of companies to back.

I had barely been in Cambridge for a few weeks, yet I was already beginning to understand that its reputation as a technology and innovation hub wasn’t simply about the number of companies it produced.

It was about the connections between people, ideas, and institutions.

Cambridge Tech Week was my first real glimpse of that ecosystem outside the MBA classroom.

III. KING’S E-LAB

I had received my admission offer back in November 2025, which gave me almost ten months before I would actually begin business school. In hindsight, that time became an unexpected introduction to Cambridge.

Through the Cambridge alumni community in Mumbai, I began attending events organised by The Cambridge Society, Bombay. Alumni such as Mansa Shroff, Shambhavi Raha, and Ribu Tharakan were actively bringing members of the Cambridge community together in the city. Many of the people I met were senior professionals, entrepreneurs, and academics who had studied, taught, or built their careers at Cambridge.

At one of these events, I had the opportunity to meet Kamiar Mohaddes, who leads King’s Entrepreneurship Lab, or E-Lab, an entrepreneurial hub at King’s College, Cambridge.

What I would discover over the following months was the scale of the ecosystem built around it.

A few days after Cambridge Tech Week, I attended an E-Lab event, where founders came in to pitch their startups. One conversation, in particular, stayed with me: a PhD student working on semiconductor technology while simultaneously thinking through how to take it to market.

He wasn’t simply conducting research.

He was thinking about building a company.

He had been incubated by E-Lab and gone through its accelerator programme, giving him access to a network of entrepreneurs, investors, academics, and mentors who could help him turn an idea emerging from research into a potential business.

What fascinated me was that this wasn’t a one-off programme.

Throughout the year, E-Lab creates opportunities for founders and aspiring entrepreneurs through speaker sessions with global industry leaders, incubation and accelerator programmes, residential programmes for early-stage founders, and pitch competitions that bring entrepreneurs and investors together.

The frequency of these interactions meant that entrepreneurship wasn’t treated as an occasional event.

It was part of the rhythm of the ecosystem.

A PhD student could be working on a semiconductor in a university laboratory one day, pitching the commercial potential of that technology the next, and finding himself in a room with investors and entrepreneurs who could help take the idea forward.

The platform created by E-Lab allowed founders to think beyond the immediate problem in front of them. It encouraged them to think about commercialisation, capital, customers, scaling, and impact ultimately.

For someone who had spent the previous few years building a business, this felt incredibly familiar—and yet completely new.

I was beginning to understand that Cambridge’s entrepreneurial ecosystem wasn’t simply about teaching people how to start companies.

It was about creating an environment where ideas could meet people, people could meet capital, and research could meet the real world.

IV. THE CAMBRIDGE UNION

As if the exposure to world-leading technologists, entrepreneurs, and researchers wasn’t enough, I was introduced to another part of the ecosystem within my first month at Cambridge: the Cambridge Union.

The Union had hosted figures such as Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Jawaharlal Nehru, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates. Debating at the Union had been something I had wanted to experience long before I arrived in Cambridge.

After witnessing a live debate, I was quick to sign up for a lifetime membership.

Then came an unexpected surprise.

Just a week after joining, the Union hosted a special speaker event with Aravind Srinivas, the CEO and co-founder of Perplexity. He had been named to TIME‘s list of the 100 Most Influential People in Artificial Intelligence, and there he was, sitting in a room filled largely with university students, speaking about his experiences.

Of course, he spoke about Perplexity, artificial intelligence, and how technology could reshape the world.

But I found myself thinking about something else.

Why would someone at the forefront of one of the world’s fastest-moving technologies take the time to travel to Cambridge and spend an evening speaking to students?

The answer, I suspect, lies partly in what Cambridge represents.

He wasn’t simply speaking to a room of students.

He was speaking to an ecosystem.

Among the audience were future founders, investors, researchers, business leaders, policymakers, academics, and entrepreneurs. Some may go on to build companies. Others may shape industries, governments, or institutions. Many will simply carry these conversations into whatever they do next.

The point was not who was sitting in the room today.

It was who might be sitting in the room tomorrow.

Days later, I came across something Aravind had written about education that captured much of what I was beginning to experience myself. He argued that the enduring value of academia is not simply knowledge, but the discipline of rigorous questioning—and that universities retain a unique value because they bring people into contact with other curious and intelligent people.

That was beginning to make sense to me.

At Cambridge, I was learning that education wasn’t confined to lectures, case studies, or classrooms.

It was in the person sitting next to me who saw a problem completely differently.

It was in the founder I met at Tech Week.

It was in the PhD student at E-Lab trying to commercialise semiconductor technology.

It was in the debate that challenged something I thought I already understood.

It was in the conversation that began with a question about business and somehow ended with a debate about economics, technology, society or the future.

And perhaps that is what has surprised me most about Cambridge.

I came here to study business.

But the more time I spend here, the more I realise that the MBA is only one part of the education.

The classroom has four walls.

The ecosystem doesn’t.

The education is in the people, the conversations, the questions, the disagreements, the ideas, and the unexpected connections between them.

The education is the ecosystem.

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Aman Attra is an MBA student at Cambridge Judge Business School in the UK.

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