She was partnered with Taksh Singhvi, an MBA student at Nanyang Business School, along with students from John Hopkins and University and St Gallen classmates.
Per Aspera Ad Astra were unveiled as the winners on Wednesday, seeing off stiff competition from MBA students at some of the best b-schools around the world. Students from ESSEC, Dartmouth Tuck and IESE Business School were all in the final.
Meret spearheaded the team’s entry, a business project that worked with a Colombian charity that helps children achieve in school through extra educational programs. The charity, Fundación Promoción Humana, funds activities in part through donations and business ventures, selling pizzas and ice-creams in the Latin American region.
Meret credits the skills she learnt on the MBA program at St Gallen for helping the team take first-place. She specialised in social entrepreneurship and says the course was “immensely useful” in helping to consult the charity over the summer. “All what we learnt in the MBA, like how to scale a business venture, and the fact that I specialised in social entrepreneurship and impact investing, was immensely useful,” Meret said. “The team is very happy with the result.”
Fellow team member Taksh is a former EY and Accenture consultant. He spent a year studying at St Gallen and has just started at Nanyang, specialising in Finance or Financial Management. Nanyang Business School offers a Double Masters or Double MBA between Nanyang & St Gallen, offering students the chance to spend a year studying in both Singapore and Switzerland.
Meret thinks that Per Aspera Ad Astra came out on top because they made sure the NGO’s wishes came first, rather than try to force their own opinions onto the project. They helped the charity to get more donors on board and scale up its pizza shop by aligning it more closely with education. “In the end we didn’t pay too much attention to what was expected of us; we tried to make sure organization was happy,” she said.
“We had fancier ideas of what we could develop, but we spoke to the organization and they told us what they needed. We tried to focus on the needs of the organization and understanding the needs of the region, rather than picking all the big concepts from the MBA and pushing them onto the project.”
MBAs will know that diversity and international exposure are some of the best aspects of studying at b-school, and Meret worked with a truly international team. She used St Gallen’s social media network to spread the word, and hand-picked members with a similar interest in social entrepreneurship.
Alongside students from Singaporean and US-based b-schools, Per Aspera Ad Astra shared the same vision. “It’s always a bit difficult to work in diverse group but the cooperation went well because they were immensely supportive,” Meret said.
“Everyone works in a different manor but we were all animated by the same goal. The student from John Hopkins was an old friend and we knew the student at Nanyang because of our campus in Singapore.”
St Gallen is based in Switzerland but last year’s cohort had 24 different nationalities mixed together. With a campus in Singapore, their MBA program is nestled in the same city as Nanyang and provided a link to its MBA students.
The FT MBA Challenge will help Meret’s career take off, after just graduating from St Gallen in the summer. She has a passion for social entrepreneurship and was involved with Oikos – a social entrepreneurship platform for students at the university.
Before studying an MBA, Meret worked in crisis management at the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Technip - among other organizations. She has done a complete 180 degrees career switch and landed a job at Unilever this summer. She was fed up with a lack of opportunities to advance her career in crisis management, and felt that she wanted to work in a company more aligned with her values.
“An MBA opened new doors and opportunities,” she said. “In my previous area, it was mostly former policeman and military personnel working there. It was very difficult to get into a directors role without being part of that world.
“I wasn’t sure what industry I wanted to switch to, so the MBA was fantastic for me because it opened new areas that I hadn’t heard of before. I was interested in sustainability and social entrepreneurship and without an MBA I wouldn’t have been able to make the switch.”
Now a procurement manager at Unilever – the giant, multinational consumer goods company – Meret is applying the skills she learnt at St Gallen. She is working on sustainable agriculture projects as well as social impact projects around the globe.
She got the job in-part thanks to the careers network at St Gallen. “The careers team put me in contact with recruiters," she said. "The University assigned me a mentor from Unilever, who was the Head of Responsible Sourcing. I was hired because of my strong interest in sustainability and there are many things that are close to my heart at Unilever.”
The FT MBA Challenge gave Meret the opportunity to find people who shared her vision for social entrepreneurship in an emerging market, and, thanks to St Gallen, she realises that is now her passion.
The MBA program gave her the tools and network to make a complete career switch - and break into one of the most popular sustainability companies on the globe.
After an MBA, Meret has gone Per Aspera Ad Astra.
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