Aditya Garg

“Mechanical Engineer turned commercial pricing leader, vibe-coding and building products end-to-end, powered by AI” 

Grad Year: 2020

Current Employer / Role: Just Eat Takeaway.com, Amsterdam: Head of Commercial Pricing, overseeing the consumer pricing function across European markets.

Is this the industry and role you envisioned yourself in upon entering the program?

Not even close. I came into HEC from an oil and gas engineering background, and my plan was to work in core engineering in Europe, ideally in new product innovation, before eventually returning to India to set up my own manufacturing unit. That was the entire premise of my application essay.

I graduated in the middle of the pandemic, when manufacturing hiring in Europe had essentially frozen. Plan A was gone, so I took a pragmatic view: whichever function offered me a role, I would take it. As it turned out, the two finance electives I had taken (Mergers & Acquisitions, and Legal & Financial) gave me useful context on a live merger at the time, between Just Eat and Takeaway.com. That context helped me land a role with the newly combined company, and that is where the current chapter started. None of it was planned. It came down to circumstance, and the finance electives turning out to be useful at exactly the right moment.

Why was HEC Paris and their MBA program the right fit for you among all of the options out there?

The honest answer starts with something that has nothing to do with academics. I have followed Arsenal Football Club for two decades, and the club’s history is deeply woven into France: Arsène Wenger, a long line of French players. I also had a close French friend and flatmate back in India. Add two years at Deloitte serving European clients, where I learned that “getting things done” in Europe, especially around the summer break, is its own discipline, and Europe had already become genuinely interesting to me before I ever considered an MBA.

Doing a global MBA was never really in question; the only question was where. Once Europe was the answer, I spoke to friends who had gone through London Business School, INSEAD, and a few American schools, and it became clear that HEC’s length was the right fit for my personality: long enough to give me room to falter, adjust, and then perform, unlike a shorter, high-intensity program, but without the two-year commitment of the US model. HEC’s emphasis on experiential learning, quite different from the Indian education system, also appealed to me as something I actively wanted to try.

How has the program helped you grow personally or professionally since graduating?

The first phase of the program was, in many ways, a masterclass in working with people rather than in the course material itself. My batch had more than 45 nationalities across roughly 150 students, and that diversity showed up everywhere: in cultural assumptions, professional norms, and what actually motivates people day to day. Navigating three different study groups at HEC, each one its own small negotiation, prepares you for any professional team setting afterwards; nothing since has felt quite as complicated.

I would also credit the school for a habit I still carry today. HEC gave us access to subscriptions such as the Financial Times, The Economist, and a range of other journals, and I read them seriously at the time. That habit of staying properly informed has stayed with me well beyond graduation, and I attribute it directly to those two years.

What’s a standout moment or memory from your time at HEC Paris that really stuck with you?

If I had to pick one, I would blend two moments that sit at opposite ends of the emotional spectrum, because both say something true about the place.

The first is not a single event but a period. I was going through a genuinely difficult personal time, made harder by COVID arriving in 2019–2020, and the entire community, from administration to professors to batchmates, came together to help, simply because they knew. I say this from a position of privilege, but for those two years, my family in India and this small group of people at HEC were what got me through. Being awarded the Leadership Award at the end of that same period, in December 2019, was a welcome surprise I still remember well, and one that meant more given everything around it.

On a lighter note, the other memory I still smile about is discovering, almost by accident, that I could cook for well over a hundred people out of a small dorm room, with a rotating cast of sous chefs recruited from along the corridor. I have never come close to replicating that scale of cooking since, and I suspect the particular joy of it cannot really be repeated either.

How did you balance your work/school/home life during your degree? What were the biggest challenges?

The first term was the harder one. I could not get on-campus accommodation, so I was living off campus, and the experience is simply not the same as being immersed in it. Once I moved onto campus for term two, everything clicked. There is an unwritten rule at HEC: never walk into class without doing the pre-read, or there is no point being there. That is a genuine challenge given the sheer volume of material, and for me it came with an added layer: as an immigrant, expat student who knew exactly what the fee represented, there was a constant, self-imposed pressure to make the absolute most of the opportunity.

That pressure meant sacrificing sleep more often than I would recommend, largely because I still wanted to have a life alongside the coursework. Football, in particular, was never negotiable. I played for the HEC team throughout, and paid for it with a broken hand and a broken leg at different points. Life went on regardless. Certain subjects were also genuinely difficult, to the point where I would only really understand a topic around the time the module ended. Eventually you make peace with the fact that you cannot be everywhere and do everything, and letting go of the FOMO is one of the more useful skills the program forces on you. I also think entering the program a little older, with a solid amount of work experience behind me, gave me a maturity that helped: the experience looks quite different depending on where you sit on that spectrum relative to your batchmates.

What are some of the biggest takeaways or skills you gained from the MBA experience?

The cultural skill set stands out the most in hindsight: learning to work across dozens of nationalities at HEC turned out to be direct preparation for JET, which is itself a highly cosmopolitan company with more than 90 nationalities in its workforce. I do not think that is a coincidence.

On the technical side, I would be dishonest if I did not admit the finance electives nearly broke me. I came in with close to no financial background, sat through classes built for aspiring investment bankers, and genuinely understood perhaps 10 to 20 percent of the content the first time round. I leaned heavily on batchmates to explain things to me again, more times than I would like to admit. I often joke that I wish I had had AI back then, because my prompt would simply have been “explain this to me like I am ten.” Persisting through that discomfort is directly what got me my first post-MBA role in Europe, given the merger context I mentioned earlier, so I owe HEC a real debt for pushing me through it rather than letting me opt out.

The other standout, purely for the sake of intellectual enjoyment, were Professor Gonzalo’s negotiation classes: something of a rite of passage for the strategy cohort. If HEC ever ran them again, I would want to sit through them a second time, if only to see how much the 2026 version of me has moved on from the 2020 version.

What is your advice for those who are considering applying to the HEC Paris MBA program?

My advice has two layers. The first is what we already touched on for “why HEC”: know your own personality and motivations honestly, then go and speak to people at different schools before you decide, because fit is genuinely personal, and what works for someone else may not work for you.

The second, more practical layer is one I do not think enough prospective students (particularly those coming from India and the subcontinent) properly understand. In India, MBA culture is built around organised, on-campus placement drives; companies come to you. That is not how it works in Europe, and I suspect it is much the same in the US. Nothing is served to you on a platter.

You are expected to try multiple things, explore the ecosystem yourself, and work out where your own alumni network has landed and in which industries, rather than expecting a structured process to do that for you. That is an information gap that genuinely needs bridging for prospective students before they arrive, not after they do.

Once you are in the program, what you make of it is almost entirely on you. It is a difficult game, but it rewards you if you do the work and stay honest with yourself about what you actually want.

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